A linear city in which fighting almost never ceased during four years stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. Some four million men on either side had to be provided with food, water, clothing, guns, and ammunition, as well as other impedimenta and necessities of ordinary life. It was Slaughter City stretched out over the fields for 400 miles, ammunitions wagons going one way, ambulances the other — the same on both sides.
All the so-called civilized and intellectual brains of Europe were engaged in trying to discover ways of breaking into the other half of this composite city of mud trenches, strongpoints, dugouts, tents, huts, and, further back, real houses and halls in towns and villages. Where the two civilizations met it was a waste-ground, a blood-soaked rammel-tip, a shanty-town of bones and death, a vast fearful stinking serpentine conglomeration of misdirected energy and talent which has since been commemorated as something glorious in thousands of shabby poppy-strewn pre-totalitarian war memorials up and down the country, and in every country in Europe.
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At Messines Ridge, on June 7th, 1917, nearly a year after the first Somme battle, the British Army tried again. It blew up the German front line, and moved forward over the earthquake zone which had been created. Nine divisions of about 12,000 men in each took part in the attack, with three more in support.
‘Briefly,’ says the army manual on demolitions and mining, ‘the tendency of low explosives is to shift, and of high explosives to shatter.’ I did not know this when I read of the Messines assault, or when my father gloated over the sudden skyward direction of the Hill 60 part of the ridge.
Tunnels were dug under the German trenches, and loads of ammonal were stacked in their secret places. Ammonal is a slightly sticky substance like damp sugar. One might say that it is crystalline and doesn’t flow very well, and that though it is fairly dry it has to be kept from getting wet. For this reason it is packed in hermetically sealed tins, which must be placed close together so that the detonation waves will pass through and ignite the well-tamped cache. A detonator and primer is buried in the charge. Ammonal produces a lifting effect, and so is ideal for mined charges.
Nearly a million pounds of it — over 400 tons — were made ready for the attack, so packed that, after ignition, its force would go only upwards. There were 55 tons alone under Hill 60, the unsuspecting Germans snug in their bunkers above. When the 1,000,000 pounds went off at dawn the whole sky was — but the dreadful picture has been many times described.
Burrowing by British soldier-miners and uniformed navvies had been going on for eighteen months. The longest tunnel was over 700 yards, the deepest more than a 100 feet. Many of the explosions had a radius of destruction of 200 feet. Thousands of German soldiers were killed. Many went mad. Thousands more were taken prisoner.
And one more ridge was captured.
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The explosions did their job. The dawn attack was successful. But though open land lay before the troops quite early in the morning they were paralysed by the vacillations of the inexperienced staff who examined maps with glazed eyes miles away in comfortable chateaux and manor houses. If the men were unable to exploit what they had bravely and painfully won — for the earthquake landscape still had to be fought over — it wasn’t entirely for lack of ability at bringing up reserves. Often they were immediately to hand, but the staff were crushed by the problems of moving them. They had not planned to break through, therefore when they did it was not exploited. Instead of advancing down the valleys on the other side of the ridge and throwing the German front into confusion by capturing Comines, the troops on their hard-won high ground, tired after the fighting and happy that they had survived, took off their tunics and lay in the sunshine because no one could tell them what to do, until the returning Germans began to pick them off in dozens, finding good targets in their white skins. One more attack, begun with such brilliancy and hope, fizzled miserably out. As has often been said before, and cannot be repeated too many times, the Germans considered that the British soldiers fought like lions, but were led by donkeys.
The gaps were occasionally there for the infantry to go forward, but the yeomen farmers and country gentlemen in uniform had the antique vision of galloping through on their horses to finish off the Germans with swords and lances! They couldn’t leave such ‘glory’ to the lower-class craftsmen and clerks and slum-dwellers. The élite of the army, the cavalry, must have its turn. They waited impatiently on their fine horses, cursing the infantry because they had not cut the wire properly, and the artillery for making so many holes in the ground that their horses would be held up, and their spotless tunics splashed with mud.
But the infantry made a big mistake when they broke open the German defences. They did not carry with them boxes of live foxes, to be released at the right moment so that the foxhunting cavalry commanders champing in the fields behind could begin a wild, tally-hoing, unstoppable chase. If the foxes had been sturdy and resourceful the foxhunters might have made it to the Rhine before the baffled German reserves had collected their wits and closed in, and driven them into the water.
Certainly the British infantry would have been glad to see them go, while those who were not could have followed them. Of the rest, the pigeon-fanciers might have sent back racers telling of the famous victory, and the ex-colliers celebrated with whippet races, while those still bored and unconvinced could have finished off the corpse-eating rats in no-man’s land — a combination of animal scenes worthy of the great Doctor Doolittle himself.
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For every officer killed or wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, twenty-two other ranks fell with him. During the whole of the Boer War, in which the total British casualties were under 17,000, the proportion was one officer to eleven other ranks.
If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the British class war was fought out on the Western Front with real shells and bullets. The old men of the upper classes won by throwing the best possible human material into the slaughter, including their own high-spirited and idealistic young. But the masses who joined up were people who had been perfected by more than a century of the Industrial Revolution. In one sense they were indeed the flower of mankind: intelligent, technically minded, and literate, men of a sensibility whose loss sent England as a country into a long decline. When they died, as nearly a million did, they took their skills with them.
Such people were thrown away with prodigal distaste because they were coming to the point of stepping into their own birthright. Their potential was about to become manifest, and they would have demanded what had been denied them for so long. War seemed the only alternative to revolution, and the leaders of every nation were faced by the same cosmic problem.
They sided with destiny and chose war, but by the end of it revolution had come in any case, and the exhausted peace or truce soon brought in another round of war and revolution that began in 1939 and has by no means ended yet. Wars can be started, but revolutions can never be stopped, for whoever creates war makes revolution, which then seems the surest chance of winning peace, even after the longest of wars. ‘Only revolution can save the earth from hell’s pollution,’ said Byron, though one cannot believe that in their heart of hearts those key men of 1914 thought exactly that. Time goes more slowly than we think. The Great War has ended, but Europe is only now recovering.