It was clear now that the war would not be won by Christmas when Britain had so confidently expected to be celebrating victory – but it was not immediately obvious that an era had ended. The cut and thrust of old-style warfare, the beguiling panoply of flashing swords, the glittering lances, of flying pennants, the sound of drums and bugles, the hammer of hooves, the dash and glory of the charge – all these were not entirely dead, but they had begun their dying. So too had feudal concepts of service and duty, for so long bred in the bone.
By the end of 1914, the Army had suffered 90 per cent casualties. Of course, they were not all dead. There were many, like Private Godley who defended the bridge at Mons, like the Gordons left behind at Le Cateau, who were captured and marched off to long imprisonment in Germany. Many of the wounded recovered, like Rory Macleod, and in due course returned to the war. And there was a nucleus of surviving officers and men to help turn a happy-go-lucky mob of civilians into soldiers and to form the backbone of the citizens’ armies when eventually they took the field. But the Regulars were finished as a single fighting force.
Debrett’s Peerage did not appear as it usually did in early spring; so many sons of the aristocracy were dead, so many baronets, and lords, and knights, so many heirs to great lands and titles had been killed, that it took the editors many months to revise the entries of almost every blue-blooded family in the United Kingdom. The Grosvenors, the Worsleys, the Desboroughs, Gordon-Lennoxes, Crichtons, Dawnays, Fitzclarences, Cecils and Cholmeleys, Manners and Wellesleys – the list went on and on. When it finally did appear, the 1915 edition of Debrett made very sorry reading.
The Smiths, the Browns, the Robinsons, the Jones and the Atkins had suffered too. But their losses, though they shocked the Empire, appeared merely as statistics. Killed 8,631. Missing 40,342. Wounded 37,264. By the end of the year the casualties, including officers, amounted to ninety thousand men.
The heady days were not quite over, but henceforth it would be a different kind of war. The thin line of troops was settling down for the winter, strengthening the line, burrowing like animals into the earth. There, much like animals, they would live or they would die, in the miseries and dangers of the trenches. All that was over by Christmas was the first wild wave of illusion. A grim awareness began to dawn that this war would be won by grit and not by glory.