To go back to the trenches is but a small step, and no one yet knows the true meaning of what went on there. The men of 1914 were slaughtered, and indeed allowed themselves to be slaughtered — which was the fatal flaw in their perfectability. The old men of the upper classes who were in command possessed the half-concealed knowledge that if they did not dispose of them in this sporting roulette-wheel fashion then those millions would turn round and sweep them away.
It was perhaps the last viciously competent task that the British upper class was to perform, and it is from the Great War that the drift between officers and men, governing and governed, between those lavish with the blood of others, and those frugal with the rich life they saw themselves on the point of beginning to enjoy, really began. Before 1914 a unity could have been possible, and the men might then have tried it. Joining up to fight was, in a sense, their way of saying yes, but the old men used this affirmation to try and finish them off.
In order to maintain a mythical ‘balance of power’ on the mainland of Europe, or to arse-lick over the humanly meaningless alliances concocted in some cosy office or dreamlike court, they destroyed the internal balance of the country. England was an imperial power that embarked on a war of aggressive defence. When there were no more colonies left to grab, the empires of the world went for each other’s throats. Germany tore the guts out of the British Empire, and choked on them.
The best that can be said is that the upper classes lacked the imagination to realize what they were doing, though their subconscious must have known well enough. Never before had such an assault been made of class against class, and the music of the German machine-guns and the percussion of their artillery on the Somme must have caused some ambiguous emotions in those who sent the men over, except that many heard the music from a distance, if at all.
For four years British soldiers were slung against the impregnable German defences, flesh against flying steel, and they never really succeeded in breaking through. The army did so in 1918 only because the Americans had started to bring their fresh skill and material into the war.
The nearest the British came to it was at Cambrai in 1917. This was due to the technical knowledge and the calm tenacity and bravery of the men in 400 tanks. They laid the German defences wide open, but the staff was so tragically incompetent that even with an armoured force that no one had ever seen before, and against which the Germans had as yet little defence, they could not take advantage of the silent and empty road leading into the abandoned city of Cambrai. They could not believe their luck and so, as always in such cases, luck continued to run against them. The other breakages of the German front, on the Somme on July 14th, 1916, later the same year at Flers, and at Third Ypres the following year could not be exploited because there were no live men left to push through the gaps.
But if the British had finally succeeded in breaking through, the staff would have sent the army into a disaster far greater than that of a failed attack. With patient, maladroit negligence they would have concocted humiliation as well as tragedy for the men. Something in their bone-heads must have warned them of the dangers in pushing on when the gap was opened, of getting a few divisions through into open country where they would be at the mercy of quick-moving German reserves, to be surrounded and hammered into annihilation. The army would lose so many men that they would be in no position to play at war with them much longer. The higher echelons of the staff might then have their own bodies threatened by shot and shell, and that was never their idea at all.
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Too high a standard was set for the men in the line by officers who never went near it. The front was regarded by the General Staff as a temporary fixture which was liable to alter at any time, for when the big push came and the breakthrough happened, no more trenches would be needed because the troops would lead the staff in a fine dash towards Potsdam. And it was liable to come at any minute, for one never knew when the Germans would crack.
Consequently, the British trenches were rarely allowed to become too comfortable for fear the soldiers would get soft, or that they wouldn’t want to leave them when told to get up and attack the Germans. They must never be corrupted by the defensive spirit while one more useless sacrifice could be wrung from them. In 1917 the Russian Army voted with its feet for peace by getting out of the line as fast as it could. The British Army on the Somme and at Passchendaele voted with its corpses for death.
The staff must have been a preening, self-conscious lot, and imagined every soldier to be the same, for they made sure that their positions were always overlooked by the Germans. They liked being chiked at from hilltops and ridges. All along the front, from the high dunes of the Belgian sea-coast, south via the hills near Ypres, the Messines Ridge, Vimy Ridge, and the uplands before Bapaume, it was indeed a theatre of war to the Germans, who were invariably permitted by the gallant British staff to have the best seats in it.
The British Army was used as a battering ram against an unbreakable door. The soldiers who formed it looked bitterly at high ground up which they would have to advance. Every year of the war they were led out on an annual bloodbath, and though the door of the German defences creaked and cracked, it never burst open.
In spite of the French troubles at Verdun, the British should not have attacked for at least another two years, so that the New Army could have been trained to the standard of its opponents and, more important, so that its officers could have been properly instructed. The German war machine, dangerous as it was, could have been slowly bled to death by the many Allies, instead of being continually and suicidally attacked.
More sensibly, the British Army should have gone on to the defensive in the spring of 1915, and at the same time tried to make peace. The Germans would not have accepted the terms of withdrawal to their own frontiers at that time, but perhaps after two more years of stalemate they might have seen it as the only possible course. But the British believed in the suicidal maxim that the best defence lies in the attack — which it does, but only if you can be sure of winning. Otherwise it leads to frustration, reaction, and stubbornness — this latter a fatal quality in the British character when it is given a free run, for it crushes fresh thought, destroys flexibility, and scoffs at improvisation.
More than two years were to go by before Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash showed how an attack could be made without incurring massive casualties — in the offensive before Amiens by the Australians and Canadians on August 8th, 1918. Monash, if any man can be singled out for such an honour, was the person responsible for Ludendorff’s cry that ‘August 8th was the blackest day of the German Army in the history of the war’. A few more generals with the intellect of Monash might have saved the British Army hundreds of thousands of casualties, and brought some kind of victory to it as well. But such people were rare, and the fools and criminals were too many.
Monash made his men train in combination with the actual tank crews before they went into battle together. When the attack opened and his men moved forward he arranged for ammunition to be dropped by parachute. The artillery barrage was only to begin on the day of the attack, and not a week before.
It was as if the longer the casuality lists became, the closer the staff must have thought they were to wearing down the Germans, and to victory. It never came in the sense they sought it, not finally until 1945, when the Bolshevism they loathed had had twenty-five years to stiffen the Russian character which was said in 1917 to have let the Allies down so badly. The Germans were finally finished off as a military nation at Stalingrad and Kursk.