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SERVANTS OF ATTRITION

You are the War generation. You were born to fight this War, and it’s got to be won … So far as you are concerned as individuals it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether you are killed or not. Most probably you will be killed, most of you.

A British staff officer to a meeting of subalterns, quoted in Richard Aldington’s autobiographical novel, Death of a Hero

A VISITOR TO PASSCHENDAELE today would struggle to imagine this small Flemish town as the object of a field marshal’s obsession and the pivot of the great Flanders Offensive of 1917. In the centre, a few clothes shops and a couple of cafes give onto a desolate square. By the kerb, curiously isolated, stands a bronze relief of the stages of the battle, sculpted by Dr Ross Bastiaan. Opposite stands the church, rebuilt since the war in red, yellow and white stones. British and German artillery destroyed the previous one, along with its cemetery, churning up the remains of the pre-war dead with the casualties of battle. The elaborate graves crowding the grounds post-date the armistice, on 11 November 1918, when the local people returned to reclaim the scab of bones and rubble that had been their home.

A closer look helps us to understand the town’s military relevance: Passchendaele sits on the highest (only about 200 feet above sea level) of a series of concentric ridges, arcs of slightly elevated ground that radiate east of Ypres like the terraces of an enormous, shallow stadium. The Passchendaele-Staden section of the ridge offered a good view and ‘jumping off’ point into German-held territory to the north-east: i.e. the village of Roulers (Roeselare), which served as a vital German supply base, and the plains of Flanders peeling away to the Belgian coast.

Passchendaele village had no strategic importance in its own right; the ridge was merely the first stage of a vast offensive that aimed to liberate Belgium, realising Britain’s original case for entering the war. The Flanders Offensive would be a distinctly Commonwealth campaign. In 1917, the exhausted and mutinous French Army were reduced to playing a defensive role on the Western Front; the Russians were in the throes of revolution; and the Americans had not yet arrived. So the British Army and their Australian, Canadian and New Zealand allies (with small French, South African and Belgian units in support) would confront the most powerful concentration of German troops on the Western Front, who were then being reinforced with fresh troops from the east. On British orders, they were to capture Passchendaele Ridge within weeks (see Map 1), seize Roulers and swing north to the Belgian coast, to fulfil one of the chief aims of the offensive: to destroy the German submarine bases at the ports of Ostend, Zeebrugge and others, whose U-boats were waging unlimited war on Allied shipping.

This would be the prelude to the total rout of the German forces in Belgium, a war-winning scenario dependent on a run of incredible victories, daunting in their ambition even with the help of brilliant command, fine weather and a lot of luck (none of which was forthcoming or guaranteed). The great French marshal Ferdinand Foch was not the only commander who had little faith in what he called a ‘duck’s march’ through the Flanders mud. As we shall see, there were other reasons why, between August and November 1917, the British and Dominion commanders drove their men beyond the edge of the humanly possible to capture the village of Passchendaele, and why the Germans were similarly driven to defend it.

The lessons of the immediate past might have counselled against the offensive. This would be Third Ypres. The First was a defensive battle fought in October and November 1914, in which the Franco-British forces just held the city, though at a huge cost in blood. The Second, from 22 April to 25 May 1915, ended in a stalemate, with Allied casualties of 87,000 against German casualties of 35,000. By the war’s end, there would be five battles of Ypres. With the exception of a single day in 1914, the British and their allies would never yield the once-beautiful mediaeval town of Ypres itself to the Germans. And not until October 1918, at the Fifth Battle of Ypres, would they remove the German forces from the edges of the city’s eastern hinterland, the ‘immortal salient’ – a blister of Allied-controlled territory that swelled up and subsided, but never burst, during four years of war. Hundreds of thousands would be killed or wounded defending or attacking the Ypres Salient; many more would live to remember marching past Ypres’ shell-cratered streets, past the ruins of the thirteenth-century Cloth Hall and cathedral, to the front. In time, defending ‘Wipers’, as the Tommies rejoiced in mispronouncing it, became a rite of passage more terrible than the Somme. The Germans, too, would remember this place with special loathing.

Prior to Third Ypres, at the start of 1917, Europe was exhausted, brutalised, locked in a conflict that had consumed the lives of millions. A young man might be forgiven for refusing to enlist in a war that had already killed two million out of nearly seven million total casualties on the Western Front, the rest wounded, missing or taken prisoner.¹ The casualty lists at the end of 1916, after the Somme and Verdun, had shocked and then benumbed the British, French and German people. In many homes, the mounting losses, intractable trench lines and ghastliness of the wounds had engendered a kind of dazed acceptance of war as an unstoppable force beyond the human agency to control.

‘You knew the horrors of war,’ recalled Norman Collins, a young subaltern on his way to Flanders in 1917. ‘We knew that 60,000 men had become casualties on July 1st [1916]. We went not thinking we’d come out of it, we didn’t think we’d live.’²

The mood of foreboding that marked 1917 was a far cry from the exuberance at the outbreak, in August 1914, when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), a band of 150,000 professionals whom the Kaiser had scorned as a ‘contemptible little army’ (hence their nickname, the ‘Old Contemptibles’), sailed for France. At the time, they were the best-trained soldiers and finest marksmen in the world. By 1917, with the exception of a few diehards, they were dead, wounded, exhausted or retired. They had not gone easily: in August 1914, this force held the line at Mons until forced to join the great French retreat towards Paris. In September that year, they had plugged a critical gap in the French lines at the Marne and helped, in an important symbolic way, to drive the Germans back to the Aisne and confound the Prussian Schlieffen Plan to conquer France within six weeks. In October 1914, vastly outnumbered, the Old Contemptibles held Ypres against waves of young German recruits, sustaining 58,000 casualties. And in April 1915, they marched to their doom at Loos, in one of the worst defeats in British military history.

The unspeakable scenes at Loos might have shelved forever the idea that huge frontal attacks could break the German lines. What happened at Loos revealed a breed of man, the British Tommy, whose courage, unquestioning sense of duty and fear of failure persuaded him to march head-on into enemy machine guns. A German witness, the historian of the 26th Infantry Regiment, famously described the result:

Never had the machine guns had such straightforward work to do … with barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the [British] ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen literally falling in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption. The extended lines of men began to get confused by this terrific punishment, but they went doggedly on, some even reaching the wire entanglement in front of the reserve line … Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire.³

Field Marshal Sir John French, the BEF’s serially inept commander, and the then lieutenant general Sir Douglas Haig were jointly responsible for this debacle.⁴ Sir John bore the brunt of the blame, for failing to send up reserves in time to hold the British gains, exposing his forward troops to devastating German counter-attacks. The toll was 59,247 British soldiers killed, wounded or missing, including three major generals and the only son of the poet Rudyard Kipling, whose death would inspire the poem ‘My Boy Jack’ (‘“Have you news of my boy Jack?” / Not this tide. / “When d’you think that he’ll come back?” / Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.’). Many soldiers inhaled British poison gas, blown back onto their trenches when the wind changed, killing or incapacitating them. Sir John was sacked, and he returned to Britain to command the Home Forces, a bitter and resentful man. Haig replaced him.

News from the wider war offered little respite in that dismal year. In the Dardanelles Campaign (April 1915–January 1916), the Allies hoped to carve a third front against the Germans, from the south. To do so, they would conquer the Turks and combine with the Russians from the east and the French from the west to crush Germany and Austria-Hungary in a three-way vice. Winston Churchill’s brainchild was a disaster: nearly half a million British, French, Turkish and Commonwealth soldiers were killed or wounded over six months of futile carnage. The Australians and New Zealanders would henceforth romanticise Gallipoli as a ‘nation-forming’ sacrifice. Their decent intent is understandable, but their annual commemorations amount to a rite of denial of what Gallipoli actually meant: the useless occupation of a few Turkish beaches that achieved nothing other than a flourish of pointless heroics and the dispatch of grief into hundreds of thousands of homes. The Allies spent the rest of 1915 nursing their wounded, regrouping, launching sporadic trench raids and training the vast intake of new recruits.

When 1916 began, the war was still young, the adventure real, and everyone wanted to be in it. The middle classes of all the respective nations were loudly receptive to the idea that they were fighting for the motherland, for King, Kaiser, Emperor or Tsar. Every side had God on their side. This would be the ‘decisive’ year, declared the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain and their colonial allies), a refrain they would repeat at the start of every year. The coming battles would be unlike anything the world had seen, fought at Verdun, on the Meuse, on the Somme, in Italy and on the Eastern Front, where Russia’s Brusilov Offensive prepared to unleash the most lethal military operation to that point in history.

Britain, France, Russia and Germany had cranked up the war effort to a level of intensity unimaginable twelve months earlier. Factories chugged away night and day to deliver the instruments of death. Millions of rounds of heavy explosive, hundreds of thousands of rifles, machine guns, uniforms, gas shells, gas masks, grenades, trenching tools, and all kinds of newfangled equipment poured off the assembly lines. Governments and military commanders adopted new ways of managing their huge new armies: the British forces were being reorganised, under the deep reforms of Viscount Haldane and Haig. The appeal from Lord Kitchener – field marshal and secretary of state for war – to fill his ‘New Armies’ had raised the largest volunteer force in the world. Almost 2.5 million British men voluntarily enlisted between August 1914 and December 1915. The promise of a square meal and the King’s shilling, more than god or country, persuaded the unemployed and malnourished to enlist. They made up the majority. Even this immense force was not enough, and from 2 March 1916 the British Government began conscripting single men for frontline duty, under the first Military Service Act; on 25 May, another Act extended conscription to married men.⁵

Germany was similarly moving to a total war footing. On 31 August 1916, General Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg instructed the War Ministry to ratchet up production to unprecedented levels. ‘Men – as well as horses – must be replaced more and more by machines,’ he wrote. Women, the wounded, prisoners, social misfits and minors would be compelled to work in war industries. The war effort was a ‘screw without end’, Hindenburg said: victory would go to the power that turned the screw tightest at the right moment.⁶ Henceforth, he called for the monthly output of gunpowder to double, to 12,000 tons, and of machine guns to triple, to 7000 pieces. Those rates of production were scheduled to remain in force until at least May–June 1917, when, a German colonel confidently declared, ‘the war would have ended’.⁷

By 1916, Europe had turned into a vast armed camp. Great armies, millions strong, gazed across no-man’s-land, bristling for action. No, it would not be over by Christmas, not this year or the next. The trenches were no longer the shallow, hastily dug scrapes of 1914. Solid wooden A-frames and duckboards, deep tunnels, reinforced dugouts and cement bunkers locked down the front lines, behind which a labyrinth of support and communication trenches, like subterranean cities, wound back to the railheads, encampments and training grounds in the tented rear areas, brimful of fresh troops and shipments of weapons and supplies. Food, ammunition and medical provisions were produced, packaged and delivered by millions of civilians, mostly women, working day and night in darkened factories on the home front. These oceans of toiling humanity lapped either side of that great fissure of black earth running from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps, where, on this ‘Western Front’, the contest of the world would be decided.

Verdun almost broke the spirit of the belligerents. The memory of that ghastly confrontation, fought over ten months (21 February–18 December 1916), disabused thousands of troops of their faith in the war and indelibly scarred the historical soul of France and Germany. ‘Like Auschwitz … Verdun came to symbolise a breach of the limits of the human condition,’ wrote the French historian Antoine Prost.⁸ The 299-day bloodbath transformed the meaning of war. The ‘noble sacrifice’, the ‘fight for freedom and country’, had become a program of indifferent extermination. Verdun killed or wounded between 600,000 and 900,000 men (depending on the source), 315,000–542,000 French and 281,000–434,000 German. At the end of it, 160,000 French and 143,000 German soldiers lay dead.⁹ Neither side ‘won’: the German strategy amounted to a series of limited attacks on French border forts aimed at drawing the blue-uniformed poilu into a narrow killing zone and then pulverising them with artillery of such intensity that ‘not even a mouse could live’. Those were the words of the chief of the German general staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, for whom it was immaterial whether the Germans actually took Verdun. The main objective of the battle, as he assured the Kaiser, was to ‘bleed France white’ (Blutabzapfung).¹⁰ Not for nothing was Falkenhayn known as the ‘Blood-Miller of Verdun’, and the Great War’s first exponent of a strategy of pure attrition.

To relieve the French at Verdun, and divert the German forces, the British and Dominion armies launched the Somme Offensive (1 July–18 November 1916). The Somme was a diversion. Haig had preferred to fight in Flanders, but he bowed to the political imperative of aiding Britain’s chief European ally. We need not dwell on this catastrophic struggle, which has produced more literature than any other Anglo-Saxon battle. As we know, or should know, the holocaust killed or wounded more than 1.3 million men, in one of the bloodiest confrontations in history. The Somme claimed 57,470 British casualties on the first day (of whom more than 19,000 were killed); the Germans lost 40,000 over the first ten days. The ensuing battles, of Albert, Fromelles, Delville Wood, Pozières, Thiepval Ridge, Ancre and many more, surged and flowed over the plains of Picardy, killing or wounding the Allies at the rate of almost 3000 men per day.¹¹

Haig later described the Somme as the start of ‘the wearing-down war’, or the war of attrition, a term that broadly meant slowly grinding down the enemy’s strength and resources, until it became possible to break through to open ground and destroy their residual strength. Attrition, reckons a US military writer, Dr J. Boone Bartholomees, ‘strategically favors the attacker since he can regulate his own pain; he can select when, where, and how hard he attacks and thus control to at least some extent his losses’.¹² That may be true, yet the ‘body count’ in an attritional war almost always favours the defenders, as the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) explained in his book On War (a lesson taught to generations of Sandhurst men): i.e. men defensively employed in well-entrenched positions had an inherent advantage over their attackers.¹³ In 1916 and 1917, the Germans acted on this: they chose not to initiate any major offensives, instead defending their gains of 1914 and 1915. And so, entrenched in their fortified redoubts, their dug-outs and concrete pillboxes, the German infantry prepared to exploit their Clausewitzian advantage: they simply sat and waited for the enemy to charge, aiming to bleed the attackers to death.

Britain, France and their allies more than obliged, hurling wave after wave of recruits at the German lines. The Somme killed or wounded many more British, French and Dominion troops than German troops, in line with von Clausewitz’s grim equation: 794,000 versus 540,000 (according to a consensus of scholars).¹⁴ Again, no side ‘won’ this series of gruesome encounters: the Germans withdrew and were reinforced; the British consolidated their modest gains.

Certain military experts now calmly remind us of the chief ‘benefit’ of the Somme: it taught Allied commanders useful tactical lessons, chiefly the correct application of the creeping barrage, without which they could not have won the war. The Great War would be a steep and bloody learning curve. Of course, Germany could cite the same lessons: the learning curve proceeded at a similar pace for both sides, ceding no ultimate advantage. In any case, the Allied armies did not fight the Somme purely to learn ‘lessons’ and educate the commanders. The more intelligent and innovative generals (Britain’s Herbert Plumer, Australia’s John Monash and Canada’s Arthur Currie) did not need the Somme to teach them the point of the creeping barrage, or evidence of its failure in the mass graves of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic dead. In this light, one can’t help wondering how families who’d lost their sons on the Somme would have reacted to this ex post facto justification for the battle: ‘Oh, we had to fight the Somme to teach the generals how to fire the heavy guns. Sorry about your boy.’

The third year of the Great War ended in stalemate after the bloodiest contests in history. Censorship could not shield the public from the casualty lists, which crowded the newspaper columns and reduced whole communities to despair. Some towns, such as Accrington, in East Lancashire, were rumoured to have lost nearly all their young men. The Somme had annihilated many ‘pals battalions’ – i.e. drawn from the same communities or industries – nourishing an impression that an entire generation was being systematically wiped out.

British High Command defended their actions on the grounds that the Germans must never be allowed to rest; the offensive spirit must be kept high; the German Army must be worn down. At the end of this ‘wearing-down war’, whenever it finally came, the victor would be the last man standing. That prospect did not unduly trouble the Allied generals. In 1917, the British commanders knew they were losing men at a faster rate than Germany, but they also knew they would soon draw on a far deeper pool of manpower, once France had recovered and the Americans had arrived. Yes, they would probably lose more men in absolute terms, but Germany and Austria-Hungary would exhaust their reserves more quickly. By that brutal logic, the Entente would win the war.

On the trains and ships bound for France they came, the usual boisterous, overconfident young men, keening for battle and ‘killing the Boche’ (or ‘Tommies’, on the German side). Many found refuge in jokes; others were thoughtful, ruminant, or immersed in their books. Many were quietly terrified. If most had shared Norman Collins’s feelings in 1914 – ‘I felt I had to defend our country’¹⁵ – and the writer A. P. Herbert’s sense that he’d been ‘calmly persuaded’ to go to war ‘for a just cause’,¹⁶ fewer felt that way in 1917. The thrill of the declaration of war had dissipated, and the patriotic affection of earlier years had cooled into something harder, more ruthless, or, at any rate, less self-deceiving. The men who had trained the new recruits had served on the Western Front and seen the carnage, after all.

By 1917, their illusion of invincibility had waned. The romance of war, the boyish hero-worship, the glory of the charge, their faith in the cause had come unstuck. The soldiers had heard all about the Somme and Verdun. They’d seen the wounded in the streets – the lucky ones – or heard about the rest: shellfire could disembowel, decapitate and castrate you. If your friend beside you took a direct hit, you’d be covered in his blood and entrails. Artillery would tear apart ‘the pleasant fringes of war … and drinking in strange towns’ with the indiscriminate power of an epidemic.¹⁷ Chlorine and phosgene gases would kill you slowly, in great agony (mustard gas would not be used until July 1917).

To say you’d enlisted for god, king or country invited ridicule from hardened veterans. The soldiers were no longer ‘duped by the War talk’, wrote Richard Aldington, an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1917, in his autobiographical novel of the war: ‘They laughed at the newspapers. Any new-comer who tried to be a bit high falutin was at once snubbed with, “Fer Christ’s sake don’t talk patriotic!” They went on with a sort of stubborn despair …’¹⁸

Others shared Private Neville Hind’s hardened sense of duty: ‘from the first day I put on Khaki, I accepted the moral responsibility for killing Germans, just as the Conscientious Objector refuses from the outset’.¹⁹ There was little glory in it; it was a job. Hind’s low-key departure, like most, was bereft of the euphoria of earlier years: a small crowd saw his regiment off. Some troops sang and shouted from the carriages, ‘though others were silent’²⁰ – such as the Cardiff City ex-professional footballer and the Northumberland miner, ‘very kind, generous and soft-hearted; getting on for 40, leaving home, maybe for the first time, and feeling it very acutely, leaving a wife and family’.²¹ ‘Old’ soldiers just back from the front had told the men what to expect. Hind’s 25-year-old platoon sergeant, puffing away on a Woodbine at the station, cried ‘like a child at the brutality of men’ as his unit departed. Hind’s regimental chaplain, who had also ‘been out’, stood on the platform looking ‘grave, yet in a sense cheery’.²²

They travelled all night to Folkestone and boarded a packed troop ship escorted by a destroyer: the submarine threat was at its height in 1917. During the crossing to France, they passed a hospital ship, a reminder of what ‘all knew, tho’ none said, that there were some of us would never return’.²³ The songs had changed. Few sang the rousing tunes that piped them into battle in 1914 and 1915: ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ had replaced ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.²⁴ But their sense of humour, ‘the great safety-valve of a soldier’, never deserted them.²⁵ On New Year’s Eve of 1916–17, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, they sang:

We’re here because we’re here,

Because we’re here, because we’re here,

We’re here because we’re here,

Because we’re here, because we’re here.²⁶

The Seabrook brothers, George, 25, Theo, 24, and Keith, 20, sailed from Sydney aboard the troop ship Ascanius on 25 October 1916 and landed at Devonport, Plymouth, on 28 December. The eldest of eight children, the brothers formed the core of a close-knit, if peripatetic family. George was an apprentice painter, Theo a fireman, and Keith a telephone operator. Pre-war photos show their father, William, padded up and playing cricket with his sons, like any other Australian dad, in the backyard of their inner-city cottage.

Their mother Fanny (née Isabel Ross) came from a prosperous family of staunch Methodists, proprietors of the general store in Grafton, a town in northern New South Wales. This determined young woman became the rock on which her growing brood relied. ‘I’ve never heard anyone in the family say a harsh word about her,’ recalls one relative. ‘She held the family together.’²⁷ Her elfin face and small frame belied a strong-willed woman of stoic calm, in marked distinction to the erratic, vulnerable disposition of her husband, William.

In 1916, the Seabrooks settled in Petersham, a working-class suburb of Sydney, where William resumed his trade as a railway carpenter, offering Fanny a welcome respite from his exhausting delusions. William had hitherto persuaded himself, Micawber-like, that his fortune lay around the next bend, in pursuit of which he’d dragged the family across the country on various doomed excursions – to Fremantle, in Western Australia, to invest in a dolomite mine; back to New South Wales, to the town of Armidale, to open a book-shop; and elsewhere, with new ideas and get-rich-quick schemes, none of which amounted to much.

George and Theo enlisted for service abroad in the Australian Army in August 1916; their younger brother Keith, aged nineteen, required his parents’ ‘full permission to enlist for active service abroad’, which he received the same month. Despite his youth, Keith had had experience as a junior officer in the militia, and would receive an acting sergeant’s and later a lieutenant’s rank. They signed the oath that bound the Dominions to defend the British realm:

I [name] swear that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the Australian Imperial Force … and that I will resist His Majesty’s enemies and cause His Majesty’s peace to be kept and maintained …²⁸

They then passed their medical examinations – free of scrofula, phthisis, syphilis, impaired constitution, defective intelligence, defects of vision, voice or hearing, haemorrhoids, severe varicose veins, marked varicocele with unusually pendant testicle, inveterate cutaneous disease, chronic ulcers, traces of corporal punishment or evidence of having been marked with the letters D. [Deserter] or B.C. [Bad Character], contracted or deformed chest, and abnormal curvature of the spine – and were pronounced ‘fit for active service’.²⁹

The voyage to England took them via Colombo, South Africa and Dakar. The day after their arrival, they marched into a training camp at Rollestone, near Salisbury. On leave, they visited London. Their postcards offer a glimpse of their characters: George had recovered from the death of his wife, in January 1916, and he wrote home with great enthusiasm. Theo lacked his brothers’ self-confidence yet ‘loved to poke fun’ at them all.³⁰ Keith was the more responsible, and wrote of his brothers’ health and plans.

They were all having a ‘glorious time’ in London. ‘This place is very cold, we had a good fall of snow yesterday,’ Keith told his grandmother.³¹ They had ‘had a great time riding on the buses, no doubt you would too,’ they told their little sister Jean.³² ‘My word,’ they wrote to their youngest brother, Clarrie, ‘you would jump with glee if you where [sic] in London …’³³

At about this time, a young Englishman with a markedly different background to the Seabrooks was serving as a junior officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Like so many former public school boys, the Old Etonian Desmond Allhusen had enlisted as soon as he left school, in August 1914. At news of the declaration of war, Allhusen and his friends rejoiced. ‘There were scenes of wild enthusiasm,’ Desmond noted in his diary. ‘A form of parting much used among the cadet school-leavers was “Good-bye. See you again in Hell”.’³⁴ Later that evening, Desmond found his brother Rupert in his room, ‘sharpening his sword’.

On 15 August 1914, Allhusen was gazetted as a second lieutenant. He attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst the following year. ‘I can’t recollect having learnt anything there,’ he wrote, ‘but the time passed very pleasantly … The Old Etonian coterie was exempt from most of the orders … and we amused ourselves without much interference.’³⁵

He left Sandhurst shortly before his nineteenth birthday and sailed for France on the night of 5 October 1915, in charge of a platoon of working men several years older. At Le Havre, he discovered that he’d already drunk most of the brandy that he’d brought for the battlefield. His regiment camped on a hill above Honfleur, the scene of Henry V’s ‘once more into the breach’ scene, he remarked.³⁶

Allhusen suffered from recurring jaundice, yet he repeatedly persuaded medical boards to pass him fit. ‘This was not very difficult,’ he wrote in 1916, after a three-month convalescence, ‘as at this time Boards took the view that if anybody said he was fit he was certain to be.’ Another man, he noticed, passed fit and ‘could hardly walk’.³⁷

Allhusen spent the first half of 1917 either in hospital or on sick leave. His frequent Channel crossings showed how total war had transformed the voyage. In 1915, he’d been ‘shown to my cabin by a steward, asking unnecessary questions about breakfast next morning. I had slept between sheets and had, in general, travelled to the war like a gentleman.’ In 1917:

I was bundled onto a small, smelly, overcrowded boat, hermetically sealed to stop the slightest glimmer of light showing. It was just a question of getting as many human beings on board as the ship would carry. There was barely standing room for everybody, and no question of lying down.

After hours at sea, ‘the atmosphere was indescribable’.³⁸

Nineteen-year-old Corporal John Ronald Skirth, of Eastbourne, had had a protected, Christian upbringing. He excelled at maths and enjoyed reading the Romantic poets. A few weeks before he left for France, in March 1917, he realised that he’d ‘fallen in love’ with Ella, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The couple promised to devote their lives to each other when he came home – a common enough dream. He sailed on the Mona’s Queen, an antiquated old bucket of a paddle steamer from the Isle of Man, which would be sunk by a German submarine on her return trip.³⁹

Skirth arrived at Le Havre at dawn on 1 April and spent the first two nights under canvas bell tents in pouring rain. In his wallet, he carried a photo of Ella, ‘wearing the spotted white dress she wore the day I fell in love with her’.⁴⁰ According to his identity disc, Skirth was officially ‘120331 Corporal Skirth, J.R., B.C.A., C. of E., 239 Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery’. B.C.A. stood for ‘battery commander’s assistant’, whose job was to gather the information on weather, wind, distance, topography and other variables necessary to calculate the target range for the guns. His battery operated the ‘heavies’ – heavy guns that fired 6- or 9.2-inch-calibre shells – as well as four howitzers, ‘stubby fat-looking monsters’, weighing two tons each, which had to be towed to the front behind tractors.

Skirth’s naivety made him an easy target for his friends, the ‘Tyneside Twins’ Geordie and Bill, who mocked him for his two stripes, ‘posh’ accent and ‘because I was barmy enough to read poetry’.⁴¹ They quickly fastened onto Skirth’s sexual inexperience (he was a virgin): ‘[T]hey were a decade ahead of me in … their familiarity with every detail of the female anatomy.’ Skirth’s other ‘best friend’ was a red-haired, six-foot amateur Scottish boxing champion from Glasgow, called Jock Shiels. In a few months, Jock would drag Skirth out of a gas-filled shell hole, ‘in which, but for him I would have died a painful death’.⁴²

Skirth grew to hate his commanding officer ‘more than any of my country’s enemies’, a man who ‘in every way possible sought to humiliate me’.⁴³ This officer, a public school and Camberley Staff College-educated ‘100% professional’ and recipient of the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), wore a neat, steel-grey moustache on a face ‘desiccated into parchment’ by the suns of India and Aden. Clearly, he had little time for men like Skirth, whom he regarded as delicate examples of the ‘New Army’; yet he valued Skirth’s maths brain, which served as the battery’s ‘calculating machine’.⁴⁴

In turn, the commanding officer was apparently unpopular throughout the ranks. ‘Everyone,’ Skirth recalls, ‘from senior officers down to the humblest ranked gunner feared [him]. I never saw him smile. I never heard him utter one word of praise to anyone. I never saw him perform one act of kindness. In addition I never saw his face register emotion of any kind – until one terrible day at Passchendaele.’⁴⁵

Fathers faced a tough choice: should they avoid the risk of denying their children a father’s love and care? Or should they offer their country their able bodies in its time of need? In 1914, the 34-year-old E. C. Allfree was ‘just a peaceful solicitor’ living in Broadstairs, east Kent, ‘with a wife and three children to keep’. When Britain declared war, he was sitting in the Country Inn near Canterbury ‘watching the cricket during the Canterbury Cricket Week’. He had had no military training, never fired a rifle and didn’t know how to ride. What good would I be as a soldier, he wondered. How could I leave my wife and family? Who would support them? What would happen to my business?⁴⁶

Posters and the press warned him that Britain needed every fit man, and he hurt his wife’s feelings when he said, ‘This is the first time I have ever wished I was not married.’⁴⁷ He was not being unkind: ‘I meant that if one was single, one would be relieved of that horrible indecision as to what one’s duty was.’ As a married man, he enlisted in the Derby Scheme’s reserves, composed of those willing to go but not yet needed. He served as a ‘special constable’, drilled and practised shooting, guarded the local waterworks in case enemy aliens poisoned the water and wandered around at night ‘looking for spies and landing parties and finding none …’⁴⁸

The demands on manpower soon came knocking. On 10 June 1916, his group were ordered to present themselves at Canterbury Barracks. By then, Allfree’s wife, Dolly, had given birth to a fourth child, now six months old. Allfree moved the family from Broadstairs – then vulnerable to German air raids – to a cottage in Herne Bay and drew up his will.

Noting Allfree’s above-average intelligence, the army awarded him a commission, and he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery. On 27 April 1917, the new Lieutenant Allfree sailed from Southampton aboard the SS King Edward, which was ‘absolutely packed … soldiers everywhere as tight as sardines’. They crossed the Channel in darkness, escorted on either side by ‘torpedo boats’ to protect them from enemy submarines. Men slept in their lifebelts, in the gangways and on the decks, ‘everywhere and on everything’. Allfree did not sleep: ‘there seemed no spot that invited sleep. I leant over the side of the ship and drank in the weirdness of it all.’⁴⁹ All through the night, the only sounds were the chunck, chunck, chunck of the engines and the swish of the black water along the ship’s sides.

At first sight, Lieutenant Patrick Campbell, nineteen, seemed another sensitive middle-class young man prone to fall prey to his imagination and crack up. Like many junior officers, Campbell was barely a man: his voice had not yet fully broken, he lacked self-confidence and his platoon’s carnal sense of humour shocked him.

In April 1917, he was saying goodbye to his parents on the platform at Oxford Station. It was ‘very disagreeable’, he recalls.⁵⁰ They had already lost one son and their eldest was stationed in Mesopotamia. The previous night, his father had read to him from St John’s Gospel, ‘Let not your Heart be Troubled, neither let it be Afraid,’ and advised him that he could do ‘what any Tom, Dick or Harry’ had done. His mother offered more practical advice: ‘You have to go, I know you wouldn’t be happy if all the others went and you were left behind.’⁵¹

From the ship’s deck, Campbell looked down on the near-deserted wharves: ‘Nobody … was interested, no-one was seeing us off, there would be no waving from the shore.’⁵² The thought that he would not make a good officer tormented him. He felt afraid, not of death, but of fear itself. Touching in its pathos is his youthful idea that a prefect’s beating or a game of football would prepare him for artillery fire: ‘I had been able to bear these things as well as anyone else, I should be able to bear shellfire. But a slight doubt remained, I could not entirely banish the feeling of unease.’⁵³ Campbell gazed at the stars and looked forward to ‘my first view of a foreign country’ and the beginning of ‘a Great Adventure’.⁵⁴

Over many of these men, observed Richard Aldington, ‘hung a sense of doom’, which a British staff officer ‘admirably if somewhat ruthlessly expressed’ to a meeting of subalterns. ‘You are the War generation,’ he said. ‘You were born to fight this War, and it’s got to be won … So far as you are concerned as individuals it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether you are killed or not. Most probably you will be killed, most of you.’⁵⁵