The Great War and Memory
‘When the war came, we had no fears at all’
Frank Sumpter – Veteran of the Western Front
‘War is organised murder’
Harry Patch – The Last Fighting Tommy
TWO very different views from two infantrymen of the British army in the 1914-18 war. The first quote from a regular, professional soldier who went to war in 1914, Frank Sumpter remembered his fighting days seven decades on in the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The second quote from the last surviving fighting man of that war, also eight decades on, Harry Patch was conscripted into the army in 1917.
More than a century has passed since the British army fought Germans, Turks and Austrians in what was commonly called The Great War. It has been a century of never-ending conflict for the British army, yet the experience of 1914-18 remains unparalleled in scale, cost, and memory. When Harry Patch died in the first years of the 21st century he was the last to remember what many have called 'slaughter'. The popular, collective memory in Britain, the commonwealth, France and the USA of the war is one of horrific slaughter, Lions led by Donkeys, dull, incompetent generals. "They mismanaged the war - Earl Haig and his generals" so remembered another old soldier, Robert Burns, in 1998. The Great War is of course now 'the First World War' or 'World War One' - a war fought so badly, it is thought, that another one had to be waged 20 years later to get it right.
The Second World War, highly mechanised and mobile in comparison, comes across as more decisive, and with the element of the defeat of fascism, infinitely more just.
The Anglo-American legend of the Great War began as the men returned home from the battlefields under the banner of 'Never Again'. France, the British Empire, Russia, and their allies had lost around six million dead and many more wounded in body and mind. Whole nations had been completely consumed by the fighting and in 1919 the manhood that had fought returned to civilian life. They had a story to tell. The first of these story tellers were the fighting men - the generals published their diaries and memoirs; the ordinary soldiers wrote up their memories. The 1920s saw a slew of first-hand literature by veterans who had experienced four years of total war. It was also a time, however, to forget what had happened. The youth of the 'Roaring 20s' - the flapper girls, the great Gatsby's, and the mass ranks of unemployed wanted to move on.
By the 1930s it was time for the politicians - the very same men who had pursued and prolonged the war - to publish their memoirs. Men like Lloyd George and Winston Churchill began to paint a picture of the war that shifted any blame from themselves down to the generals they had employed. Then came another war, a bigger war, a war against the evils of fascism and Nazism and a war that globally eclipsed the one that ended in 1918.
In 1961, more than a decade and half after the end of the second world war - with its 58 million dead - a book was published by an old Etonian former junior cavalry officer. Alan Clarke's 'The Donkey's' - inspired by the diary of a junior officer in an Irish regiment on the western front - tells the story of the British army in France in one year of the Great War, 1915. Its title comes from a quote said to be from the German general Ludendorff, "The English fight like lions but are led by donkeys". The Donkeys damns the army, damns the generals, and damns the whole war as a squalid, bungling mess. The book inspired the popular mind and in particular a Great War orphan and writer Charles Chilton. He along with theatre producer Joan Littlewood created a musical play based on The Donkeys called 'Oh! What a Lovely War'. It captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s where the old order was literally dying and a new age of irreverence to post-Victorian ancestry swept all before it. In 1964, the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great War, BBC television produced a new and epic 26-part documentary series 'The Great War'.
Using archive footage, graphics, quotes from generals and politicians read by actors, and narrated by Michael Redgrave, the series is still seen as one of the greatest bits of television made. The most memorable aspect of the programme remains the use of interviews by veterans - men who 'were there' - most of whom were in their 70s, still lucid and vocalising candid eyewitness accounts of their experiences in battle. Their stories, along with original footage of the battles, spared nothing of the horror of war.
The decade of the 1960s was also one of war, in particular wars of post-colonialism, and the USA’s war in Vietnam. These were wars fought against guerillas and insurgents, and they went badly for the Americans and Europeans. What's more was that war between great military powers had become almost unthinkable. The USSR and the USA had amassed huge arsenals of nuclear bombs and missiles, enough to destroy the world several times over. Parallel to the nuclear arms race and stalemate and the burgeoning counterculture was a mass trans-Atlantic peace movement led by intellectuals like philosopher Bertrand Russell. During the decade academics and intellectuals like AJP Taylor, schooled in left-wing thought wrote of the war as a senseless slaughter waged by incompetent upper-class generals and suffered by innocent masses from the working classes. Following the defeat of the USA in Vietnam over the next two decades this simple view of 'World War One' stuck. In the 1980s the comedy series 'Blackadder goes fourth' hilariously sent up the British army experience of the Western Front.
Blackadder was based on the ideas espoused by the AJP Taylor and Alan Clarke school of thought that had its foundations in the political memoirs of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill way back in the 1930s. Yet other factors were going on that once again is changing the views of the 1914-18 war.
The same year Clarke published The Donkeys, 1961, German historian Fritz Fischer published a book 'Germany's aims in the First World War'. In the book Fischer revealed never seen before archival material that laid out Imperial Germany's clamour for world power. Backed up by British historian John Rohl Fischer reveals that Imperial Germany, led by Kaiser Wilhelm II, deliberately started a war of aggression to defeat its main rivals of Great Britain, France and Russia. The German navy pushed for an overseas empire challenging British dominance, whilst the German army planned for a double defeat of France and Russia on land. The army chief of staff, Von Shlieffen, devised a plan to fight and win on two fronts - a lighting war against the French followed by the destruction of the huge Russian army in the east. This view has largely stuck. Meanwhile wars still raged around the world - post-colonial conflicts and proxy wars in the 1970s and 1980s.
Following the collapse of the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the USSR, the USA and its armed forces assumed the role of global police, believing its way was the right way. A war against Iraq in 1991 saw the USA victorious. A new school of military thought was born, and it reached back to the 1914-18 war
The modern mind associates the Great War with trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, artillery, unimaginative mass infantry assaults causing bloody stalemate and dragging on over four years with both sides fighting to a standstill with an armistice being signed in November 1918. But there is a counter view. Historian John Terraine claimed in the 1960s that the Imperial German army was decisively defeated in 1918, and more so it was largely down to the British army. In the 1980s and 90s this view was carried by historians like GD Sheffield, Prior and Wilson, and Paddy Griffith.
In his 1994 book 'Battle tactics of the Western Front - the British Army's art of attack 1916-18' Griffith This book, along with Terraine and Sheffield's explanations that the British army captured as many German prisoners of war and artillery guns as the combined strength of their allies (France, USA, Belgium, Portugal) has changed the way the war is studied today.
Quite simply put, at the beginning of the war armies fought the way they always had for centuries. They became bogged down by mechanised defence (entrenched with machine guns and artillery, using railways to bring up reinforcements). It had to take three years to learn a brand-new way of fighting and to allow new technologies to be developed. So, by the last year of the war, in fact the last one hundred days (from August until November 1918), British commanders had at their disposal attack aircraft, artillery that fired from the map creeping and hurricane bombardments using combinations of high explosive, shrapnel and gas shells, tanks, and low-level infantry assault units (with command often devolved to section commanders like corporals) all meshed together with new wireless communications.
But it was costly. Sheffield argues that 20th century warfare demands a high price in lives if it is to succeed - the prime example of the Red Army's defeat of Hitler counted in millions of dead (with no one criticising Soviet generals for their efforts).
More so it was this experience of defeat at the hands of the British all-arms assaults in 1918 that taught the German generals of 1939-41 how to fight Blitzkrieg (many were junior officers facing this onslaught). Military academies and NATO planners now place great emphasis on how the British army defeated the Germans in 1918.
The Great War was the largest enterprise the British army had taken on. out of an army of five million, some 780,000 were killed and another million and a half wounded.
Without any doubt all the men who served would have suffered mentally afterwards yet society at that time didn't allow for their suffering. Shell shock - or combat PTSD as we know it today - caused men to simply crack up at the time. The effects of modern industrial, mechanised war broke young men's souls. Hundreds of them simply found it impossible to carry on and were executed for 'cowardice' and 'desertion'. Only in the past 20 years has the British establishment recognised the impossible circumstances these men faced and posthumously pardoned them.
Yet it wasn't just the masses of working-class men who suffered. The officer corps of the army in the Great War - particularly the junior, front line officers - were decimated. The life expectancy of a junior officer was measured in weeks, if not days. Officers were drawn from the ranks of the old upper classes. By 1919 when the men had returned home a kind of revolution had happened. Upper class young men, trained to rule the country and rule the empire had disappeared in the mud of the Somme or the swamps of Ypres. A rough meritocracy had emerged. Men like Clement Attlee (a junior infantry officer at Gallipoli) had for the first time seen and shared the privations of their working-class men and on returning home were determined to change things. The way was open and the path to a change of power in Great Britain had begun that led all the way to the Labour victory of 1945 that ushered in the welfare state, public ownership of services and utilities and a fairer society.