1918: The Last Act

Prologue

WHEN Europe went to war in 1914, it did so in a mood of joyous certainty. Both sides were confident that their causes were just, that their armies were invincible, and that their consequent victories would be glorious, overwhelming and practically immediate. So inexhaustible are the springs of human optimism that it was some time before the nations as a whole realized that the war was not progressing in accordance with their first ingenuous suppositions, and that they would be called upon to pay for their days of splendid ardour throughout years of pain and anguish. National reserves of fortitude and endurance were to be drawn upon to the full, and Germany’s dominance among the Central Powers increased as time passed.

Among the Allies, however, the relative seniorities of the partners subtly altered. Russia and France had possessed the enormous forces which first flung themselves upon the enemy in August 1914, when Britain’s contribution was her Navy (in Continental eyes of no account) and an original expeditionary force so small as to enable her own propagandists to coin the historic appellation ‘contemptible little army’, and then to attribute its origin to her foes. Time was to alter this, and by 1916 Britain had an army in the field which Germany recognized as the major block to Kaiserlich ambitions. Britain had thus replaced France as the senior partner on the Western Front; but although the power had changed hands, the philosophy remained the same.

For years before the war, the official policy of the French Army had been based upon the ‘Spirit of the Offensive’ with which their soldiers had been thoroughly imbued – and time and occasion combined to infect their British ally with the same principles. When, eventually, the French were to pause and reflect upon the wisdom of their creed, their erstwhile junior partners regarded them with a disdain not unmixed with malice, and assumed the tradition of the offensive themselves. Victory, however, still eluded them, but in a moment of doubtful inspiration was produced the ‘Doctrine of Attrition’ which, if lacking in imagination, possessed the supreme appeal of simplicity. All it required for its operation and success was an unlimited supply of men for the trenches – and Britain’s Empire was vast.

But by the end of 1917, it was becoming evident that even Britain could not afford such wild extravagance as that in which her army commanders had been indulging. True, the enemy had suffered considerably as a result of the vast conflicts which had been forced upon her, but despite these losses there was as yet little sign of disintegration among the Central Powers. Russia’s losses had been even greater than Germany’s, France’s losses had come near to crippling her. Europe was thus on the verge of bankruptcy – and a bankruptcy far more vitiating than one to be declared in some centre of commercial law, for it was of blood and spirit, of manhood and human hopes. Grim despondency was the mood which now dominated the peoples of the warring nations – not yet plunged into defeatism, but unable to perceive the means of victory.

Yet two events had occurred in 1917 which would offer the golden prize, first to the Central Powers, then to the Allies.

In March had begun the Russian Revolution. It did not immediately release German and Austrian divisions from the Eastern Front – indeed the Russian General Brusilov was to launch yet another offensive against them – but it was obvious to the German rulers that by early 1918 they should be able to concentrate their strength in the West. In order to expedite the Russian collapse, the German Government even allowed the passage of Lenin across the country (‘in a sealed carriage, like some dangerous bacillus’), for they knew that if they were to grasp their chance of victory, they must do it quickly. Germany’s chance was now, for in April had occurred the second event which might well serve to snatch victory from her: America had entered the war, and her vast potential of men and materials would undoubtedly tip the scales against the Central Powers if given the time to do so. So it became a race, against time for Germany, for time for Britain and France.

As 1918 dawned, half in fear and half in hope, Europe looked towards America. She alone seemed to possess the key to the situation. Whether she would arrive in time to turn it was another matter.

*     *     *

1. The Deadlock

IT was bitterly cold in the trenches during the last fortnight of the year 1917 and there were many successive days of frost. Snow mantled the ground, softening the edges of the trenches, the gun-pits and the shell-craters, covering for a while the ugly detritus of bitter fighting. For most of the men in the line it was to be remembered as a good time, for they had learned by now the best ways of keeping warm, and hard ice was infinitely preferable to the treacherous, stinking and engulfing mud in which they had fought and bled during the last interminable months. It was quiet, too, the armies on both sides more concerned with their own comfort than with enemy disturbance.

The soldiers had lived in trenches for a long time. To many indeed, it seemed that their whole adult lives had been spent thus, mole-like below the surface of the earth, in circumstances of varying danger but invariable discomfort. There were few among them now to recall the early days of the war, the counter-marches, the cavalry screens, the street-fighting; and those who did were listened to – when they were listened to at all – with scepticism and open disbelief; for they seemed to speak of another war, another life. In any case, it was all past history, dead and gone.

But it was the essential preface to present adversity.

*     *     *

At the war’s outbreak, the Schlieffen Plan had flung the German armies across Belgium and the north-eastern provinces of France in a gigantic wheel which pivoted on the Vosges Mountains and was intended to sweep westwards of Paris, then eastwards to entrap the French armies and crush them against their own fortifications and the Swiss border. The plan had failed because of the impossibility of feeding, supplying and reinforcing the armies on the outer edge of the wheel across the enormous expanse of the battleground they had covered, combined with weaknesses of mind and nerve in the German High Command. As a result, the radius of the wheel was shortened, the outer armies swung in east of Paris and exposed themselves to flank attack from the French garrison in the capital, while the remainder of the French armies, instead of being trapped, had been merely pressed back along their own lines of communication.

Thus when the exhausted German troops reached the Marne, sweltering in the August heat, they were held as though in the bottom of a sack by the re-formed and recuperating Allied line. Every attempt they made to thrust across the top of the sack and renew their sweep westwards was countered by extensions of the Allied line to the north until it stretched up through Amiens, across the Belgian frontier and the Flanders plain, and ended on the sea between Nieuport and Ostend. In the meantime, pressure on the bottom of the sack had forced the central German armies to recoil along their own tracks – and now the situation developed as before, but in reverse: as the German lines of communication shortened, the French were stretched. Eventually, positions of balance were reached where the forces facing each other could not move forward without additional strength – and feverishly, each unit dug defensive positions to hold until reinforcements should come up in sufficient numbers to enable them to break through the enemy line opposite.

But they never arrived.

No matter how strong the force assembled, how heavy or numerous their artillery, how devoted and valiant their soldiers – always the defence was too strong. Power in defence proved easier and quicker to build than power in offence to assemble. Time after time this was proved – in the Ypres Salient and at Loos in 1915, at Verdun and on the Somme in 1916, and in April 1917 the Nivelle offensive drove the point home so hard to the French poilus in the line that they mutinied and refused to have anything more to do with the offensive. ‘We will hold the line,’ they said, ‘… but we will not attack.’

And faute de mieux, while the French weakened what little strength remained to them by internal dissension and strife, the British infantry were sacrificed in hundreds of thousands to hold the attention of the German High Command away from the dangerous sectors of the line. The British did not swarm over the Passchendaele Ridge or burst out of the Ypres Salient – the weather and power of defence saw to that – but for month after squalid month the slaughter went on while for every man that fell to enemy fire, one was drowned in mud. Eventually weather and utter exhaustion closed down the fighting, leaving, as usual, more difficult tactical problems for the attackers to solve than those with which they had originally been faced.

Late in November 1917 there was a sudden and brilliant burst of hope for the Allies. Despite an engrained belief among the Staffs that horses provided the only permissible means of transport for troops in action, sanction had been obtained for an attempt by massed British tanks to penetrate the enemy line opposite Cambrai.

It was brilliantly successful – too successful in fact – for the tanks and their supporting infantry penetrated four miles during the first few hours. This was so extraordinary a feat for those days that the Staff, being unused to feeding such a rapid advance and in any case short of men as a result of their recent extravagance, were unable to reinforce the thrust with sufficient reserves to maintain momentum, and there existed for several hours a two-mile wide gap in the German defences through which the two cavalry divisions in reserve should have poured. But nobody gave them orders to do so and they remained where they were until it was too late; meanwhile the tank crews were exhausted and their comparatively primitive engines were in dire need of attention or replacement.

The positions were held – and improved – by supporting infantry for nine days, at the end of which the Germans launched a counterattack against the haunches of the two flanks of the advance. They did not win back all their lost ground, but they did cause a considerable withdrawal – to the line of what was to become known as the Flesquières Salient – and the hopes which had rocketed both in England and in the Allied trenches, fell accordingly. However, not everyone’s morale suffered, and members of the Cavalry Club were able to congratulate themselves upon the attitude of sceptical disgust with which they had always regarded the new-fangled petrol engine.

And in order to deflect opprobrium which might fall upon his own head, the Army Commander in whose area the attack had been carried out (and who on November 25th could confidently have expected honours and the Nation’s gratitude), in early December wrote unfairly and uncharacteristically: ‘I attribute the reason for the local success on the part of enemy to one cause and one alone, namely – lack of training on the part of junior officers and NCOs and men.’ Sir Douglas Haig, however, the Commander-in-Chief, would not support this attitude, sacked several of his subordinate commanders and assumed full responsibility for the set-back himself.

The episode was thus concluded, cavalrymen believing that their traditional position on the pinnacle of the military hierarchy was unchallenged, the tank men angry but obstinately certain of the ultimate justification of their ideas. The infantrymen consoled their dashed hopes of an end to their appalling tribulations with their customary mordant cynicism, and life in the line continued as before.

It was not a pleasant life for either side, for it was characterized by mud, the stench of decomposition, and feelings of almost unbearable strain and futility – strain as a result of the conditions, futility as a result of the utter lack of success which had attended all efforts on both sides to break the appalling deadlock on the front. It had existed now for three whole years, blocking the progress of nations, robbing their populations of happiness, and ending so many lives in futile and inconsequential agony – for delusive hope had tantalized ten million men with dreams of breaking it, and in so doing had led them forward to a million deaths.

From the Belgian coast near Nieuport, the trench lines and the strips of ground between and behind them which war had wasted, lay smeared across the land like the trail of a gigantic snail. It left the sand-dunes of the coast in a fifteen-mile southerly curve, then bulged out eastwards and back again like the outline of a chancre around the murdered landscape of the Ypres Salient. Then from Messines to just east of Rheims it wobbled in an uncertain curve of small salients and re-entrants, making an overall bulge to the south-westward, after which it ran due east for nearly sixty miles to the Verdun fortress complex which anchored it firmly.

Then came the St. Mihiel salient – two thirty-mile long sides of an equilateral triangle which jutted into France – after which the line curved gently and comparatively evenly south-eastwards, until it rounded the northern end of the Vosges to run south along their eastern flank. Opposite Mulhouse it commenced its final stretch – southwards across the Belfort gap, to end just in front of the little village of Beurnevesin on the Swiss frontier.

The strip was sealed at its northern end by the sea – augmented by a murderous tangle of underwater wire, booby traps and contact mines sown by both sides – and at its southern end by the Swiss frontier, jealously guarded by troops of that naturally apprehensive neutral. Between these points the web of trenches ran in a swathe of danger and discomfort – across rivers which flooded them for months on end, across main pavé roads whose surfaces had long been blown to granite chips or ground to powder, across minor roads which had been completely obliterated. Villages had stood on the line when it had first been formed – they had sometimes been the anchorage points upon which company or battalion flanks had rested: now their remains were perhaps a collection of shattered, roofless buildings, deserted by their owners, inhabited only by transient poilus ‘resting’ in a quiet part of the line, while in sectors held by the British the villages had gone completely, only a crude placard reading ‘Site of Pozières’, ‘Site of St. Julien’, ‘Site of La Boiselle’, reminding passers-by of their erstwhile existence. From the air, pilots or balloonists would sometimes observe a pinker tinge in the ground where brick rubble had filled the craters and stained the mud.

The French right wing – along the flank of the Vosges – was a discontinuous line of forts and outposts, but along the rest of the line it was, in theory, possible to walk below ground from Nieuport to Verdun. (It would have taken at least two months, and enormous determination.) In practice such a journey could never have been made through the Allied trenches and is of doubtful possibility through those of the Central Powers. So far as the British were concerned, although parts of the line had been very strongly fortified with deep trenches and cavernous dug-outs, such practice was in general discouraged by the Staff, who recognized the difficulties of waging offensive warfare once the men who had to carry it out had been allowed to provide themselves with any degree of comfort or protection. This, of course, did not prevent them on their infrequent visits to the line from complaining angrily about the untidy and generally inadequate state of the trenches, the men’s uniforms, and the general attitude of thinly-veiled contempt with which they felt themselves, correctly, to be regarded.

The French attitude to fortification was similar, coloured by the fact that the trenches were in their own soil and a considerable area of their country was occupied by the hated Boche: the sooner the foe was evicted the better – and by 1918, the great majority of the vaunted French Army were unconcerned as to whether this desired end was obtained by a treaty of victory or one of defeat. They had realized that even victory can be bought at too high a price and were beginning to suspect that they had already paid it – so it was illogical to waste time and effort forming anything but the flimsiest and most temporary defences. It was also hard work, and would raise suspicions in the Boche mind that offensive activity was contemplated. This would bring retaliation and more French blood would be spilt. No – let the trenches be deep enough for the men to shelter in them as necessary, and if the Americans when they took them over wanted something better, then they could dig them themselves.

So if the British trenches were in places shallow and unsafe, the French trenches were in places virtually non-existent.

But the most serious obstructions to an undercover pilgrimage from the sea to Switzerland would be provided by nature. There were long periods when large portions of the line were flooded, and indeed the majority of the British line had been dug in country where it was estimated that the water-table was only a matter of two or three feet below the surface. Nevertheless, Field Regulations and Staff Orders demanded trenches seven feet deep, and by such devices as high sandbag parapets and quite extensive projects of civil engineering coupled with continual pumping operations, there were even times when the trenches were habitable.

But when bombardment destroyed the intricate drainage system, or heavy rainfall overburdened it, the trenches flooded and mud lay across the battlefront like a gigantic squid awaiting its prey. During 1916 a piece of German propaganda called The Archives of Reason was circulated in the Americas offering advice to those who wished their countries to join the Allies.‘Dig a trench shoulder high in your garden,’ it suggested, ‘fill it half full of water and get into it. Remain there for two or three days on an empty stomach. Furthermore, hire a lunatic to shoot at you with revolvers and machine-guns at close range. This arrangement is quite equal to a war and will cost your country very much less.’

Few pieces of propaganda have contained so high a proportion of the truth – not that this prevented the combatant Governments from condemning ever-increasing numbers of their countrymen to exactly such an existence. Neither were those countrymen allowed in training so graphic and accurate a description of their future abode and activity. They were, instead, shown diagrams of impressive symmetry and then later sent to such dry and well-drained areas as Salisbury Plain in England, where they duly translated the diagrams into physical facts.

Here, the trenches traversed back and forth in beautifully accurate lengths, the chalk of the Plain lending itself to the clean lines of exact right-angles. Firesteps were level and wide enough for the heavy boots of the men who stood upon them, sandbags were clean and properly stacked, grenade and ammunition shelves convenient but deep enough for safety. There was ample material for full revetting, and the duckboards fitted snugly over the sump channels; the latrines brought smiles of delight to the most pernickety inspecting general.

In these ideal trench systems, saps zig-zagged forward to neatly dug listening posts or perhaps to well-sited and sandbagged machine-gun nests, and with no hostile interference to impede the work, the barbed wire was neatly and tightly strung between its pickets – at night too, to give reality to the exercise (the pickets having been accurately sited and driven during the afternoon period of instruction) unless, of course, it had been raining too hard for the instructors. Communication trenches snaked superbly back to the support lines, shallowing as they went at the fixed and statutory rate, and when they eventually shallowed up to ground level, it was usually alongside a deep pit with concrete base and semi-circular bastion in which stood a beautifully painted sign reading ‘Gun Pit’. To see the real thing one had to journey to Happy Valley, Larkhill.

Such was the ideal, and elderly generals brought back from retirement saw to it, with the aid of long-service NCOs, that the rag, tag and bobtail of the New Armies were smart and soldierly in appearance, and moreover knew how to retain that smartness when they went overseas. A few younger officers, recovering from wounds and awaiting their return to the front, did occasionally try to introduce some reality into the picture, but their efforts did not receive a great deal of support.

For the reality at the end of 1917 was something quite different.

An official report made at the time stated firmly that the British line was in no state whatsoever to withstand a determined attack. It was rarely sited to good advantage, having invariably been formed along the high-water mark of an attack. The protective wire belts were far too thin in number and flimsy in construction, machine-gun posts were inadequately sandbagged, traverses were sketchy, trenches insecurely revetted, while long stretches had little parados and no parapet: the sentries lay in grooves, or all too often behind barricades of piled bodies. There were few deep dug-outs, no deeply buried signal network, and the only concrete shelters were those captured from the Germans. (There is a decided note of pique in the report of one British Staff Officer, who indignantly complained that all the shelters which he inspected had been constructed with loopholes pointing in the wrong direction.)

© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962

In theory, trenches were to be constructed like this.…

© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962

...and laid out like this.

Communication trenches were few in number and had often been allowed to fall into disrepair, switch-lines having been used as supply trenches: these in turn had been allowed to drop to the defensive level of the purpose they served. In the back areas, the old British lines from which the Somme and Ypres offensives had been launched should, in theory, have been available as lines of deep defence, but with the British effort concentrated for so long upon attack, there had been no labour available for their upkeep. In places also, the French civilians had actually begun to fill in and clear away some of the rear lines of the British area, in order to restore the land to cultivation. Oddly enough there seems little evidence of their being allowed to follow this practice behind their own lines – but perhaps they did not consider it worth while to do so.

Artillery positions were usually in somewhat better case than those of the infantry, but close up behind the front line gun-emplacements were shallow scoops in the ground and relied far more upon canvas camouflage for protection than upon concrete. After firing a few rounds, even in icy weather, the ground beneath often broke up under the recoil, and the guns had to be dug out, re-sited and re-laid.

A revealing comment on the life lived in the trenches is given by Robert Graves. ‘The Western Front’, he says, ‘was known among its embittered inhabitants as The Sausage Machine, because it was fed with live men, churned out corpses, and remained firmly screwed in place.’ It did so moreover in conditions of appalling discomfort. In past summers every bursting shell had spread dirt and dust in vast floating clouds, and the flies multiplied in the filth and spread sickness and intolerable irritation: in wet weather the chaos was coated with slime. The least unpleasant conditions a front-line soldier could expect were those now reigning – hard frost – when at least the trenches and dug-outs could be kept clean and dry, although it might take half an hour’s energetic jumping up and down and arm-pounding to restore circulation after a spell on the firestep. But the climate in Flanders and Northern France had generally been too temperate to provide this relief. Humidity, not ice, had been the prevailing factor.

The stench, therefore, for most of the time was nauseating and inescapable. Stagnant mud, rotting half-buried bodies, stale human sweat and excrement, the pervading reek of chloride of lime, all these have haunted, for the remainder of their days, the memories of the men who occupied the trenches; and a malicious practice, common to both sides, was to lob occasional mortar bombs into enemy latrines with depressing effect. Often the lingering, sinister odour of phosgene or mustard gas condemned the soldiers to the sweating discomfort of rudimentary gas-masks for hours on end, while cordite and lyddite fumes were so much a part of the day-to-day existence as to be virtually unnoticeable; only the fragrance of burning wood, bubbling Maconachie stew (meat and veg) or frying bacon relieved occasionally the mephitic misery.

In the trenches, the British lived on bully-beef and stew, tasteless ration-biscuits which burnt well in time of fuel shortage, strong, dark brown tea made with condensed milk, and until the middle of 1917 there had been available for the front line troops an apparently inexhaustible supply of plum and apple jam; by 1918 some sectors were receiving jam of another flavour, but had been doing so for so long that they occasionally maundered nostalgically for the old days. A tot of rum for each man went into the tea at morning stand-to, but among the men there was little drunkenness in the line as, except for that ration, spirits were forbidden to them. Among the officers it was different, and gallons of whisky and cognac were consumed each night: but this may have been as palliative against the appalling strain and responsibility, and in any case there was little room in crowded dug-outs for furniture-smashing or riotous parties.

And all day and all night, along the entire length of the front and on both sides, were played the endless games of cards. The card-players were a race apart – uninterested in food except as essential fuel, uninterested in conversation other than call, curse or cackle of triumph, uninterested in the progress of the war or even the daily battle, except in so far as it took players from the table, or furnished new ones. These men may well have been the ones to find the most satisfactory cushion against the realities of life.

The realities of death were ever-present and inescapable, too; all but the most sensitive minds had grown callous in self-protection. Those too open and receptive drove their owners to madness, to suicide, or at best to bitter mockery, and the poets who retained their lives and sanities produced verse of searing power.

To these I turn, in these I trust,

Brother Lead and Sister Steel;

To his blind power I make appeal,

I guard her beauty clean from rust.…

wrote Siegfried Sassoon, and satirically offered it to a world which had become capable of believing that he meant it.

All day and every day, Death was present – and at night, the working parties and patrols went out to court it. From dusk until just before dawn they were out, hacking at the earth to carve connecting trenches between isolated posts or even between shell-holes which could be used by machine-gunners, driving iron screw-pickets or wooden stakes into the ground to support lines of hastily-draped barbed wire, lying close to enemy trenches all night in order to overhear their conversation; perhaps leaping into them, and after a few minutes’ nightmarish activity with bomb and bayonet, dragging back to their own lines some whimpering, blood-smeared prisoner, for the sake of a few morsels of incoherent military intelligence.

Draped on the wire belts were the bodies of the men killed during these white, nerve-racked, back-breaking nights. Some were killed by rifle-bullets as they crawled over the ground carrying coils of wire, some caught by scything machine-gun fire as they stood to fix the wire, some bombed by prowling patrols as they worked, hearing above their own exertions only the last few footfalls of the oncoming enemy, or the soft thud of the grenade as it landed at their feet. The entire trench system from the Channel to the Swiss frontier was dug, fortified and held by pain and death.

At any hour of the day or night, death or mutilation came from the guns. On the ice-hard ground the shells would burst with devastating violence, slivers of steel sighing or screaming as they sped through the frost-laden air to clatter on the ground or to thud dully into animate or inanimate obstruction. Each type of gun had its own noise, each type of shell its own evil. German 77-millimetre field artillery spat ‘whiz-bangs’ which arrived with the noise of giant fire-crackers: 5·9s threw out their shells with a vicious bark, the shells whining and growling over the valleys and ridges before ending their lives with violent, ill-tempered crashes. Heavy guns pounded the back areas with shells that roared overhead like express trains and smashed to earth with tremendous and awful effect; and every now and then minenwerfers would cough their black burdens into the air to wobble uncertainly in a terrifying parabola, and burst with wide obliteration in the trenches.

The infantry hated the artillery. They hated its wantonness, its random, murderous power, above all their defencelessness against it. It was like a primitive god, uncertain, inconsistent and unjust.

Against enemy infantry, the soldiers had at least the defence of their own skill and their sentries’ eyesight. During the day, these crouched for hours at their periscopes, constantly scanning the enemy positions and the ground between – and at night they lay out in forward posts, watching no-man’s-land in the pale-green, spectral light of the flares, listening to the continuous muffled drum-beat of limbers and ammunition columns, of lorries, horses and the million men who shuffled interminably behind the battlefronts.

All men took this duty in turn, but in the times when they were not occupied on the firestep or about the trenches, there was talk of home, desultory reading – and sleep: by 1918 they had months of arrears to make up. Tarnished strains of music from mouth-organ or gramophone floated through the British trenches in quiet times, invariably playing the song-hits from the London shows: ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, ‘Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. But the singers sang the trench ballads – obscene, ribald, some unbelievably bitter:

The bells of hell go ting-aling-aling,

For you but not for me,

The herald angels sing-aling-aling,

I’ll be up there for tea.

or

If you want to find your sweetheart, I know where he is,

I know where he is, I know where he is.

If you want to find your sweetheart. I know where he is,

Hanging on the front line wire.

Rarely did the notes of classical music sound in the British lines and a record of a sonata would remain unplayed or be quickly broken unless jealously guarded by its owner, but oddly enough strains of such music would be listened to in silence if they floated across from the enemy lines. One infantryman tells of the existence in 1916 of an old piano in the trenches opposite, upon which some practised hand had played Schubertian melodies for hours on end. When after a day of sporadic inter-trench raids the piano was silent, there was no satisfaction expressed, and the following day the infantryman heard a sentry softly whistling passages from the second movement of the Unfinished Symphony.

Other sounds in the background of trench life were the scrape and clatter of spades, the clank of dixies, the thud of earth-balled boots on the duckboards in fine weather, the slop and squelch of mud and the continual trickle of running water in wet: curses and laughter, shouted orders and the high cry of ‘Stretcher bearers!’ – these formed the tapestry of sound, rent by the crack of casual bullet, burst open by the explosion of occasional rifle-grenade or ‘minnie’.

The men themselves were not of the highest standards of either physique or morale. It was impossible that they should be by 1918, for the cream of the Empire’s manhood had already been lost on the Somme, and since. In the first day of that ill-conceived attack – largely in the first hour – nearly 60,000 of the young, ardent enthusiasts who had rushed forward to join Kitchener’s New Army had fallen; and the slaughter of the following months plus Passchendaele had taken most of the rest. Those who still lived and were fit enough to serve in the trenches, did so with shattered nerves, and bodies which cringed with expected agony at every rifle-crack and bomb-burst. According to the casualty records, as many men had been wounded and returned to action as were serving in the front line – but some had been wounded several times, thus allowing a proportion of unscathed.

The old Regular Army – the Contemptibles – had gone; graves, hospitals and prison-camps held the majority, the residue served on the Staff.

There was still the continual influx of youngsters coming in as soon as they reached the minimum age – as their brothers had done in 1914 and 1915 – but now their ranks were mixed with conscripts and the ideals of service and sacrifice which had animated the original New Armies were corroded away. When everyone had been a volunteer, the sense of patriotic compact had engendered a fierce pride in being a front-line soldier. There had been a willingness to accept all hardship, all pain, and death: only the end of the war or a bullet could end a voluntarily entered contract. But now this atmosphere was gone, and the sly and the self-centred strove to set the pattern of behaviour. Often they were successful, and divisions with magnificent records gained at Delville Wood or Gallipoli were to prove of doubtful reliability during the closing weeks of the war.

Yet in many ways these men were more efficient soldiers. The cunning which they developed in avoiding the more obnoxious duties sometimes helped them to avoid the enemy bullets, and the almost dog-like devotion and reverence which the first volunteers had offered to their regular NCOs and officers, had been replaced by a deep and not ill-founded scepticism. ‘Never obey orders – they’re already cancelled’, was a maxim which too often proved reliable, as young officers coming new into the line were quickly taught. Older officers were by now well aware of the fact that tomorrow a live soldier would be of more use than a hero uselessly killed today. Courage and fortitude were still available in abundance – but eager confidence was at a premium: the well of the soldiers’ patriotism had been drawn upon too deeply, and too often had its waters been poured wastefully away. Now they wished to