THE GREAT WAR, one of the most catastrophic and traumatic wars in human history, will very soon be beyond living memory. It is now eighty years since it ended. This book and the BBC television programmes it accompanies were commissioned to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of its ending. it seemed that this was the last chance to tell the story of the First World War through the first person testimony of the men and women who experienced it and whose lives were shaped by it. The aim was to retrieve the memories of the tiny and dwindling band of survivors from the heady days of 1914 and 1915 when two and a half million young men volunteered to serve King and Country. In the following years, they would face the shocking reality of modern, industrial warfare, witnessing the deaths of many close friends and comrades. More than a million servicemen from Britain and her Commonwealth and Empire would die on active service. Two million more would be injured or maimed. How these men, some as young as sixteen or seventeen, coped with this maelstrom and then lived with the memory is, for later generations, a source of abiding fascination and respect.
As well as documenting the men's experiences, we also wanted to record the memories of the women, some of whom served alongside them. They too played an important and often forgotten role in the war. We wanted to hear from the nurses who tended the soldiers' injuries, the canary girls who risked their lives making shells in the munitions factories, the wives and sweethearts who lived in terror of the telegram boy, and the daughters, still in school, who would never see their father again.
How much would these men and women, in their late nineties and early hundreds, actually remember? Would the historical detail and drama they lived through still be fresh? Would the emotional hurt still remain? How did it feel to look back across eighty years at such a cataclysmic event? How did they cope with the loss and sacrifice suffered by so many? These were just a few of the many questions we asked.
But to start with, there was the daunting challenge of finding the people to talk to. The men and women of the First World War form a kind of lost community. There were probably around 4,000 men still alive who fought, perhaps 200 nurses who worked behind the lines, maybe 1,000 munitions workers. A tiny handful of the most active veterans still attend the Cenotaph each year and return to the Western Front to remember their fallen friends every summer and autumn. These were relatively easy to contact through the ever helpful veterans Associations, such as the World War One Veterans Association and the Western Front Association, which organised reunions and activities. However, most veterans had completely lost touch with their old comrades and had no contact with any First World War organisation. This isolation and anonymity is even more pronounced with women who served and worked in the war. A few organisations like the Red Cross and Queen Alexandra's Nursing Sisters had until recently kept in touch with a handful of elderly nurses, but apart from this nobody knew how many were still alive, where they were or what their stories might be.
In trying to track down the survivors of this ancient, lost community, it has been my enormous good fortune to work with Richard van Emden. When I first met Richard around four years ago, he astounded me by claiming to have been in personal contact with one hundred and twenty First World War veterans. He had been obsessively collecting them, almost like a vanishing species, tape-recording their memories and photographing them for over ten years. A few of these old soldiers were interviewed again and filmed for our project. But a contact book bristling with centenarians can within two or three years dwindle to almost nothing, and sadly before “Veterans” had got under way, many of Richard's veterans had died or were too ill to be interviewed.
We virtually had to start again. Over fifteen months we made a determined last attempt to uncover the men and women of the Great War. We placed letters in almost every local newspaper in Britain, contacted hundreds of old people's homes, combed through agencies that specialised in working with old people, spoken to a long list of museums and libraries, made appeals on local radio, and pleaded with others working in the field for names and addresses. The response has been generous and overwhelming. Many hundreds of people helped us with leads on friends, neighbours and relatives, or occasionally with details of veterans they had themselves tape-recorded. We seemed to tap into a genuine feeling that the memories of these men and women should not be lost forever.
We discovered around 120 new veterans in our research. A few died before we even met them. Others, we were told, had only fading memories and were too ill to withstand an interview. The veterans were scattered all over Britain, and with little time to spare we had to be selective about whom we met and whom we filmed. The average age of the twenty-five veterans who feature in this book is 101, and twenty-one are centenarians. The oldest veteran was nearly 105, the youngest just 95 (he was thirteen when he went to France). The interviews were carried out in two stages. Richard first recorded the stories with a tape recorder, and then those with the most pertinent memories would be filmed. Our criteria for this selection were the vividness of their experiences and a range of stories that would enable us to cover a wide spectrum of events and issues throughout the war.
Men who survive into their late nineties and early hundreds were overwhelmingly middle class, and this was reflected in the veterans we spoke to. Many seemed to have been retired accountants, office managers, and headmasters, who had preserved body and mind through lives of quiet professional service. Some, like Tom Dewing and Fred Hodges, had extraordinary memories which we recorded. But we made a special effort to document soldiers who came from a more humble background. in 1914 Britain was a rigid, class-ridden society, rooted in manufacturing industry and three quarters of the men who joined up were working class. very few have survived to a great age, and because of this, their voices have rarely been heard in previous oral histories of the Great War. However, they form more than a third of the interviewees who appear in this book. Amongst them is Royce McKenzie, a battalion runner on the Western Front and one of the few exminers who survived the ravages of industrial disease to reach one hundred years old.
Once we made contact with a veteran who still had vivid memories, we tried to film him straight away. It was a race against time, a point that was powerfully brought home to us in November 1997 when two veterans whom we were just about to film died within a week. Five of the soldiers featured in this book died shortly after we filmed them. Like all those we interviewed, they were aware that they had little time left to live. This gave an added urgency to the filming – but the interviews were rarely sombre. Most of the men and women were facing death with great courage and humour. If they were frightened, they certainly weren't showing it. Often they would laughingly quip “You'd better hurry up and get on with it. I won't be here for much longer”. Many of them, as young men, had expected to die during the war – they felt privileged and often amused to have survived for so long.
We found just over half our interviewees lived, as one might expect, in nursing homes and sheltered accommodation. I was surprised, though, how many were quite independent, living by themselves (or in one or two cases with their wives), despite their frailty and failing eyesight. Often there would be a relative nearby to help cook, clean and look after the garden. In a few extraordinary cases, veterans continued to live like men who have just retired. Most remarkable was Hal Kerridge, aged 100, who could have easily passed for seventy. When we interviewed him in March 1998, he was living a completely independent life, tending his immaculately furnished detached bungalow near Bournemouth and driving round in his Audi.
To meet and talk to people of such a great age, about some of their most intimate memories, was an awesome experience. I have interviewed many people, but these were different. To speak to men and women born in Victorian England, brought up at the height of Empire when wars were still fought on horseback, provided a rare glimpse into a twilight world that has almost passed beyond reach.
Amazingly, though television arrived in their lives only when they were about to draw old age pensions, they were in no way fazed by the lights, the camera and the film crew which invaded their living rooms. When the camera started turning, there was sometimes an initial period of awkwardness and embarrassment, as they got used to being interviewed. But then most blossomed. Even those who were ill and very frail seemed to find a new vitality. They told their stories in the most moving detail, creating an unforgettable picture of their wartime experiences. Relatives and carers told us it was the performance of their lives. Many said afterwards they had wanted to do justice to the memory of their comrades and friends, most of whom died long ago. This was their tribute to a lost generation.
The intimacy and emotional power of these interviews is at the heart of what is different about this book. The stories it contains certainly won't make military historians change their interpretation of the major battles of the First World War. Our intention has instead been to focus on the private lives and feelings of the men who fought, and of the women both on the battlefield and back home. For many years, these experiences have been deeply buried, too painful to be recalled. But in the last two decades, veterans started to talk of the war with an honesty and depth of feeling that was almost impossible before the 1970s. Significantly, most of our interviewees began to talk about what happened to them only in the last few years. In their nineties and hundreds, they finally decided to unburden themselves of memories which haunted them for a lifetime. Their passion to tell how it was, is of real historical significance. There are, of course, a number of well-known diaries and autobiographies which dig deep into wartime angst. But the emotional experience of the men and women who lived and fought through the War remained largely hidden from history.
Each chapter in the book intertwines personal testimony with the bigger military and social themes of the war. Within the book there is also a broad chronology moving forward from 1914 to 1918. It begins with the call to arms, the journey to the front line, working and fighting on the Western Front and contact with home. It continues with the Battle of the Somme in 1916, front line medical care for the dying and the injured, death and the sense of loss and bereavement, the physical and mental damage done by the war, the important role played by women on the home front and the experience of British Prisoners of War. It ends with the road to victory in Europe in 1918, and finally reflections on the war's conclusion and aftermath. Each chapter opens with an introductory overview which sets the background to the personal testimonies that follow.
Time and space have prevented us from documenting the experiences of survivors in every theatre of war. The war at sea, for example, has had to be omitted. Our main focus has been the Western Front – generally acknowledged to have had the greatest impact and significance for British servicemen. Through the testimonies that follow, we have tried to convey something of the courage, dignity, humour, and the humanity of the last survivors of the Great War. We hear the authentic voice of the infantryman, the officer, the prisoner, the signaller, the nurse, the stretcher bearer. Through these stories, we can perhaps better understand what fighting and living through the First World War really meant.
Steve Humphries
September 2005