The British battalion commanders in the First World War did not like the uncomfortable mud, but death and replacements made them feel they were actually getting somewhere. Raids and minor attacks were constantly launched to keep up the spirits of their men and foster the tigerish grit of aggression in them. But as soon as they had to stop much of this, in the eerie winter of 1917–18, and go on the defensive because they really had no more men to throw away, the Germans came back and broke through with comparative ease, on March 21st, 1918.
Haig, Britain’s number one war criminal, expected the Germans to advance in this attack at the same slow pace of his own clumsily-planned assaults. The remnants of the Fifth Army were hardly able to save themselves because it had been insisted that the British soldiers should have no training in the art of retreat. By this time the army was so weakened in morale that it could not be trusted to do it properly. If it couldn’t attack, then it had to fight and die where it stood.
This senseless edict took away their chance of life, for tens of thousands were killed. In actual fact the British Army excelled in the art of retreat — as in the fighting withdrawal of 136 miles in thirteen days from Mons in 1914, when the small British Expeditionary Forced faced several Germany Army corps which attempted to envelop and destroy it. The retreat to Dunkirk in the Second World War, and the subsequent evacuation, was a great military feat.
With encouragement and planning a similar operation might have been repeated in 1918, but there was panic and rout in what was left of the Fifth Army as it fell back — with the usual acts of great and unquestionable bravery. Discipline cracked, and only the French divisions, recently recovered from their own mutinies, saved the British from disaster.
Brute force was used to bring the soldiers to heel. Redcaps and officers held gangs of stragglers at gunpoint to herd them back into the fight. Not all casualties were caused by the Germans. The full story of the retreat has yet to be written, though it probably never will be. Many old scores were settled in the confusion. Men shot their own officers and sergeant-majors with more readiness than usual — though one heard of this happening during the rest of the war as well, such frequent tales that there must have been truth in them.
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Most of those who came back from the war did not want to talk about it, were embarrassed if one questioned them, became furtive in their recollections, as if they had taken part in something shameful.
It was left to the self-confident, extrovert, unimaginative commanding officers to arrange for the military histories of their units to be written, perhaps in order to wipe away some of the shame that they might otherwise have felt. Men I spoke to in childhood were savagely wry: ‘Never again. They only sent us to France because they wanted to get us killed.’ Not for them the regimental histories, to pore over with their hearts that had been steeped in the bitter realism of war. If they could have bothered with any reminiscences at all they might have preferred the highlighted accounts of disillusioned poets who were, after all, humanly closer to them.
They were sour and sad because they had been dragged into war by the foetid, super-efficient ruling-class machine that for a thousand years had perfected its grip on their souls — but which did not know how to win a war when it came to fighting one, or how to stop it when the blood-bill ran too high. And the men were angrier at the fact that they had allowed themselves to be betrayed, final proof that their manhood had gone and, with it, that supreme self-confidence which had only become apparent to them when they had already offered themselves up to the war, by which time it was too late.
To give the impression, as history books do, that the British nation volunteered for the war ‘as one man’ is false. Perhaps one man can do so. After one man, another will follow, and even if the time gap is infinitesimal, it cannot be said that they went to the recruiting centres together — though it was to the advantage of government propagandists to have the population believe that this was so. I would like to think that one followed another like sheep, or that a hundred men were paid by the War Office to stand outside a recruiting centre and have their photographs taken, than that they sprang to it like automatons.
All sorts of tricks and pressures were employed to get men into the army in the two years before conscription came. Those of a certain class who did not hurry to join up finally capitulated when nanny met them in the street and handed them a white feather for cowardice. My Uncle Frederick, who said that this became quite common, was offered one on the top deck of a tram by an elderly woman. Instead of blushing with shame he gave her a violent push: ‘Leave me alone, you filthy-minded old butcher!’
Then he made his way off the tram expecting to be pursued by howls of ‘universal execration’ from other passengers, but they were embarrassed and silent, so that he walked down the steps unmolested.
This nanny appeared to have mistaken him for some type which he clearly was not. They seemed determined, he told me, to get their revenge on those young gentlemen whom they had been forced to spoil and mollycoddle as infants. They also possessed more than a residue of spite against the parents they had been bullied by, and retaliated now by hurrying their pet sons into the trenches — or any sons they could get their hands on, for that matter. It was one more example, he added, of how war puts the final touch of degradation on certain people in whom it has already got a fair grip. Not that this was meant to malign the women. Far from it. Men did the fighting, after all.
In war it is the worst of a country that persuades the best men to die. It is easier to deceive the best than the worst. But if it is true that the best men are fools and go with ease, while the worst are cunning and find it easy to hold back, what else can war be but an utterly sure method of destroying a country? Uncle Frederick argued against this, and said that any who went deserved exactly what they got. I was inclined to take his word for it, for he himself never put on any uniform, and so bolstered my faith in humanity. He thought it was a case of the old wanting their revenge against the young. Those young men who fight and come back will then grow up to revere the values of the old who made sure they went — so the old in their deadly wisdom fondly imagine. And who can say they are wrong? The geriatrics stay behind to cheer them on, while the less senile put their black-hearted experience into smoothing out the paths that lead to the splintered sinews and dereliction of the battlefield.
One does not want to be unjust to those who took part in the war, but I do not see why the dead need war memorials, since they are already dead and so have no more requirements of this world. Perhaps the living want them more, to try and justify the feeling of guilt they have towards the dead, the guilt that eats at the living because they survived. No dishonour is done to the dead by wanting to see all war memorials destroyed. As for survivors still sound in wind and limb, they wouldn’t want them either if they hadn’t been worked on to desire them by those self-same people who manipulated their sentiments and got them into the war in the first place.
What about the maimed, blind, gassed, and limbless who, after all, paid the most? The only real voice they have left is that which enables them to cry out now and again for a living pension or pittance with which to sustain themselves. I feel sure that, knowing what it is to be maimed for a lifetime, they would not go into that war or any war if they could have their lives over again.