Matthew Cooper explains how being involved in the Great War would be an adventure that few wanted to miss out on – are British soldier remembers hearing that he was to be stationed in England instead of being sent to France in 1914: “We felt that time was slipping away. At any moment there might be a decisive battle on land or sea, the war would end and we would be late for the hunt.” But soon the adventure of war would become reality – and for many of the ‘adventurers’, their adventure would result in death. As one veteran from the Western front put it: “We thought it was going to be a lovely little game – but it wasn’t – it was wicked - it was a horrible sacrifice of life.”
As Matthew Cooper wrote in his diary:
“The nature of our training had changed as the year progressed so as to adapt to the conditions we would encounter. We could now visualize the wasteful and dreary vigil of trench life and could see better what was likely to be required of us. It was still a great adventure but there was a realization that no quick victory awaited us on the other side and we would need to develop and display qualities of endurance, self-denial and mental control.”
For many young men now committed to the army, their expectations of war were far different from what they actually experienced. They were unequipped emotionally, mentally and often physically as their training was very brief and basic.
The living conditions of the trenches the men were forced into were unbearable, primitive and beyond anything they could have expected or prepared for. Trench warfare on the Western Front was a ‘static affair’. Upon arriving in France, for many of the soldiers there was suddenly the somber realization that it was warfare – not a game, and they “might not return”. Most of the young men were overwhelmed with fear and bewilderment on the Western Front as they had no knowledge of what was expected of them as they were “terribly unprepared” and had no knowledge of what to expect. “Their idea of war as an adventure had been proved terribly wrong.”
As the volunteers (who made up the bulk of the army in 1915) came to the front line, they realized for the first time the shock and horror of war life.
Private Harold Saunders wrote in his diary:
“During training I was aware only of the glamour of War. I prepared myself for it with enthusiasm, and bayoneted and clubbed the stuffed sacks representing the enemy with a sort of exalted ferocity…The journey from Southampton to Havre in an ancient paddle boat and on from there by train in a cattle truck to the mysterious destination called Front seemed like a fitting prelude to the adventure. It was tedious and uncomfortable, but we told each other this was war. We became better acquainted with tedium and discomfort later.”
Gradually the soldiers realised that the fighting was not going to be over by Christmas but could go on for years. New and more efficient methods-tanks, planes and gas, added to the sheer misery of the soldiers. Battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele saw soldiers killed in numbers never seen before.
Plagued by the “perished” cold, rats, lice, a shortage of food and homesickness, the soldiers began to question what they were doing-especially since the Generals and Officers, with a few exceptions, stayed well behind the actual fighting lines. Rats in their millions” infested the trenches, “gorging themselves on human remains- grotesquely disfiguring them by eating their eyes and liver- they could grow to the size of a cat.” Private Harold Saunders wrote: “One got used to may things, but I never overcame my horror of rats. They abounded in some parts- Great loathsome beasts gorged flesh… A battalion of Jerrys would have terrified me less than the rats did sometimes.” The rats caused infection, contaminated food, and remained a pest for the duration of the war. Lice too, flourished in the trench conditions and bred in the seems of filthy cloths-plentiful in the trenches- causing epidemics of Trench Fever- a “particularly painful disease.” Frogs were found in the base of trenches while slugs and horned beetles crowded in the sides. “Trench life was a particularly disgusting and filthy affair.”
The conditions in the trenches were appalling- cold and wet with “few comforts”. In William Bernard Whitmore explains in his diary: “We marched through the communication trenches, up to our thighs in mud and water, often times above our thighs, water running into our gum boots… the enemy firing over us all the time. The firing line was worse than anything imaginable- standing up to our waist in mud.” Trench foot, a fungal infection caused by these cold, wet and unsanitary conditions was common in the early years of the war and could result in amputation if the infection turned gangrenous.
The infantry had little faith left in their leaders. As Andrew Bowie remembers: “It was a bloody massacre. They didn’t see the conditions in reality that we were up against.”
Leave was rare and it could be difficult for the average soldier to get home due to the problems in transportation. One soldier explains how they had “perhaps two weeks leave being granted each year.” Because of this, the soldiers became very battle-weary and in desperate need of rest- not assisted by their having to sleep sitting up. As Private Harold Saunders recalls: “Lack of rest became a torment. Undisturbed sleep seemed more desirable than heaven and much more remote… I have slept on the march like a Somnambulist and I have slept standing like a horse. Sleeping at the post was a court-martial affair, with death or field punishment and a long term of imprisonment as the penalty. But, try as I would not to fall asleep, I often woke… with a start to Find myself confronted with No Mans Land.”
Many of the soldiers were young, frightened and very homesick- as is evident in many of the letters they wrote. For thousands of men in the army it was the first time that they had been away from home and the ‘noble cause’ they were fighting for seemed harder to actually believe in. Any letters home were heavily censored and the soldiers could not talk about how they felt or what was actually happening. Most of the letters contained only trivial information. Harold Sandys Williamson wrote to his parents on January 26th 1918, “Tomorrow I expect to start a light job.” But despite the censoring, the majority of the soldiers still managed to convey their true feelings. Private Jack Mudd wrote to his wife four days before his death in the Battle of Passchendaele: “We are expecting to go up again in two or three days, so dearest pray hard for me and ask Marie for God will not refuse her prayers, she doesn’t know the wickedness of this world.”
News from home could take weeks to arrive. Without news from home, men worried about their families if they lived in an area that was under threat and about male relatives who were also away fighting. Private Jack Mudd continued: “I trust you and the children are quite well. I guess you have been worried with the air raids. You know dear, it’s hard to be out here fighting and yet your wife and children cannot be safe. Still dearest don’t worry, you have a 20,000 to 1 chance and God will watch over you as he has been with me ever since I have been out here.”
Having witnessed many of their friends and comrades slaughtered on the battlefields, many soldiers became depressed and demoralized. Soldiers remember the “devastation beyond words’’ and being “broken hearted” at losing their friends. One soldier explains how they “couldn’t stop to ask questions or help a friend – we just had to go on.” This poem, MATEY, written in Cambrin in May 1915 illustrates the grief many had to face after losing their comrades:
NOT comin' back to-night, matey,
And reliefs are comin' through,
We're all goin' out all right, matey,
Only we're leavin' you.
Gawd! it's a loody sin, matey,
Now that we've finished the fight,
We go when reliefs come in, matey,
But you're stayin' 'ere to-night.
Over the top is cold, matey --
You lie on the field alone,
Didn't I love you of old, matey,
Dearer than the blood of my own
You were my dearest chum, matey --
(Gawd! but your face is white)
But now, though reliefs 'ave come, matey,
I'm goin' alone to-night.
I'd sooner the bullet was mine, matey --
Goin' out on my own,
Leavin' you 'ere in the line, matey,
All by yourself, alone.
Chum o' mine and you're dead, matey,
And this is the way we part,
The bullet went through your head, matey,
But Gawd! it went through my 'eart.
-Patrick MacGill.
Soldiers waiting to go ‘over the top’ were terrified, reluctant and longing of home. Most men had to “face the ordeal of going ‘over the top’ and advance over No Mans Land against the hail of bullets and shells.” In these cases, battalions had a 90% mortality rate and resulted in men “suffering tremendous wounds” while the battlefields were left “littered with the dead and dying.” As Dick Barnen later explained, “Warfare was a grim and unsatisfactory business and the suffering and loss had to be faced with stoic endurance.” Morale became lower and lower as more men saw the fighting as a futile exercise where neither side seemed to make any advance. The many songs sung during the war to boost morale now contained lyrics such as: “At home with my wife I wish to be, away from the snipers shooting at me”; “O, I want to go home, I don’t want to go to the trenches no more. O my, I don’t want to die I just want to go home.”; “I want to go home yes I want to go home. The cannons they roar and they roar and they roar. I don’t want to go into the trenches no more. Will you take me over the sea, where the Germans cannot get me? O my, I don’t want to die I just want to go home.” Poetry too, became grimmer and more realistic as the war continued. By looking at Wilfred Owen’s poetry, I can observe that at the beginning of war he, like the majority of other young men at the time, wanted to be patriotic and fight for his country, but after he had seen the feutility of war, he changes his mind and this is evident in his words of 1917: “we were marooned on a frozen desert. There was not a sign of life on the horizon and a thousand signs of death…For love of God seems dying.”
The final role call after the Battle of Passchendaele revealed thousands missing. One soldier recalls: “So many friends were missing. I must have been the luckiest man on earth to go over the top and survive.” Another remembers, “We realize we were extremely lucky to survive that terrific slaughter. But we had to go forward it was our duty – what we joined to do. Andrew Bowie explains, “There wasn’t a chance for us – it was suicide really – the whole situation was just a nightmare.”
One poet wrote during the war:
DEATH AND THE FAIRIES
BEFORE I joined the Army
I lived in Donegal,
Where every night the Fairies
Would hold their carnival.
But now I'm out in Flanders,
Where men like wheat-ears fall,
And it's Death and not the Fairies
Who is holding carnival.
During the war, it became evident that “this horrific sacrifice of life” was no longer a “game.” At this point, songs and poems became more cynical as the soldiers began to “realize what death was- in the horrible form that it took in the rat infested bodies.” Out of the two million volunteers of 1914, 150,000 were killed by the following year leaving their friends and comrades “devastated.” One young man remembers: “You realize their aspirations and ambitions – to put the world right. But they died in a few minutes. What a horrible waste of life.” The survivors had to adopt the philosophy ‘kill or be killed’ on the battlefield and had to remember that ‘it’s either him or me.’ This necessity to kill and the effects of enemy fire and attacks haunted up to 90,000 resulting in shell shock or physical or mental breakdowns. As Matthew Cooper once wrote:
We looked up and sighted a bomb soaring up into the air above us. The soldiers around me ran out wildly into the open. For the first time, I seemed suddenly to loose the will to live. I felt it was not use fighting against fate, that if I were to kill, it would be better to die quickly and without panic….I was confident that my end would be instantaneous….It missed the trench by inches…The instinct of self-preservation was quick to return; I flung myself flat in the trench.”
By 1917, after destructive and devastating battles such as Somme and Ypres, there was a new mood of longing for the war to end. This yearning was especially heightened since conscription was introduced, therefore bringing a new less willing and unenthusiastic breed of people onto the Western Front; these men were asking themselves, “Why should I go out and fight someone I never knew?”
The remaining soldiers also had to face the horror of gas attacks which resulted in “excruciating human destruction” such as blindness and often, for the unequipped – death. Sergeant Jack Dorgan explained how “our eyes were streaming with water and pain.” As Private Saunders described it: “that creeping cloud of death and torment [that] made a nightmare scene I shall never forget.” Another account from Private Alfred Bromfield retells the events: “We watched about a dozen puffs of yellow smoke coming up from what we thought was lyddite shells…. About five or six seconds later, the lookout yelled “Blimey, its not lyddite, its gas…. We had no protection at all beyond our own inventiveness – there were no such things as gas masks or pads in those days.” Private W. Underwood wrote: “There were masses of Germans behind this gas cloud…and there we were, helpless.” Private W.A. Quinton observed: “The men came tumbling from the front line. I’ve never seen men so terror stricken, they were tearing out their throats and their eyes were glaring out.” The young Sergeant Cyril Lee explains: “I was only a youngster of seventeen and I’d sought adventure, but when I saw this I thought, ‘What have I come to?’”
The end of the war brought with it an even higher toll of casualties. As Hubert Trotman recalls, “We were still fighting hard and losing men. We knew nothing of the proposed Armistice until a quarter to ten on that day.” It also brought with it an even lower morale amongst the soldiers as Desmond Allhusen wrote:
“The whole aspect had become unutterably black. All the battles of the spring and summer seemed to have been in vain. Arras and Messines had been so bright with promise, and even this awful show (Passchendaele) had risen our wildest hopes. But it had all ended in this, with fresh German troops streaming across from their long holiday on the Eastern Front, to race our worn out divisions and start it all over again.
The future seemed to be an endless vista of battles, each one worse than the last. We still felt that one day we would win, but we had stopped saying so. The war was the only real and permanent thing, thriving and increasing in a world that was going to ruin. All our discussions ended by complete agreement on one point: that whatever might be the end for the nations, our destinies were clear enough. We would all be hit, and if we recovered, we would return and be hit again, and so on until we were either dead or permanently disabled. The ideal was to lose a leg as soon as possible.
Perhaps we were unduly pessimistic, as two or three out of the twenty-five officers did survive uninjured to the end of the war. At that time it seemed impossible that anyone could survive long. It seemed to be courting disaster to entertain any hope of anything. The morale of the army had settled onto a rock-bottom of fatalistic despair, in which the majority carried on mechanically, waiting for the next wound, while the weaker members went under, either to lunacy, desertion or self- inflicted wounds.”
Private J. A. Hooper observed, “Towards the end of the war, we were so fed up we couldn’t even sing ‘God Save the King’ on church parade. ‘Never mind the bloody King’ we used to say, ‘He was safe enough’, it should have been, ‘God save us’.”
At the end of the war, the overriding feeling was of relief to be going home at last, to be alive and able to go. It was very difficult to feel enthusiastic and happy about the victory, except that it meant being able to see home again.” H. S. Williamson wrote:
“Happiness surged through me, joy and relief came to my brain, the incredible end, and fighting over…The sun shone finally for me… My heart warmed for my companion. I had come back from the grave; I hardly walked the earth as living man…He pitied me. He very kindly put his arms around my shoulders. I responded. In this rather un-soldierly way we set off down the hill.”
But the young men’s joy was subdued by the by the somber remembrance of the young men that fought alongside them but had not lived to see the victory. As Richard Torbin remembers:
“The Armistice came, the day we had dreamed of. The guns stopped, the fighting stopped. Four years of noise and bangs ended in silence. The killing had stopped. We were stunned. I had been out since 1914. I should have been happy. I was sad. I thought of the slaughter, the hardships, the waste and the friends I had lost.”
Corporal Clifford Lane wrote:
“As far as the Armistice was concerned, it was kind of an anticlimax. We just were too far gone, to exhausted really, to enjoy it.”
But while relief came, many young men also had emotions of anger as they had wanted to “push the Germans back all the way” and Smiler Marshall recalls how he has “never heard so much swearing.” Now that the Germans were in retreat, many thought they could and should “finish the Jerrys off!” The Armistice also was a source of frustration as many of the soldiers asked, “Why have we lost millions of men when they sorted it out at a table? Why didn’t they do that first?” and the Great War was seen as “a war that should never have happened”- but this was never versed as it would have been seen as unpatriotic.
In hindsight, we can see that the opinions of the British young men towards war changed between the year 1914 and 1918.
Although it is obvious that most of the men would have agreed with the “Lady Reader” in 1914 as the war was met with excitement and enthusiasm, this judgment may have been made in naivety and immaturity.
It is only their mid-war and post-war opinions that most accurately display the true feelings of war as their knowledge and experience has culminated in this extensively considered decision.
Therefore, I conclude that the majority of Britain’s young men would have adamantly disagreed with the “Lady Reader’s” statement of 1915, as their desperation to get out of the primitive trench life which they had been forced to endure for the best part of four years would have been paramount to them.