Haunting memories of life at the front
We call it the First World War because of the one that followed, but in our minds it remains, even as we move towards its centenary years, the Great War. Men who came home on leave found they could not communicate their experiences to their families; but in due course, they were to communicate them effectively to the next generations through a remarkable series of interviews conducted between the 1950s and 1970s by the Imperial War Museum. Nothing can compare with the power of a first-hand account, and the tapes make compelling, sobering, often humbling listening.
Max Arthur has edited these into a series of extracts, each capturing a particular moment in the story, and tailor-made for classroom use as well as for maximum impact on the general reader. The weight of the material is drawn from British soldiers on the western front, but there are contributions from women at home, Australians at Gallipoli and moving testimony from German soldiers.
Huge numbers of Germans had lived in Britain before the war: one Tommy finds himself talking during the 1914 Christmas truce to a German soldier who had kept a butcher’s shop opposite his uncle’s cobbler’s on Essex Road in north London; a Mancunian gets into a friendly argument across no-man’s-land with a German who claims to know Manchester better. Such moments bring out the surreal horror of the slaughter, that men who bore each other no ill will, and who would not normally think of hurting anyone, should kill each other so savagely and in such numbers. One German soldier was so horrified by having bayoneted a French poilu that he nearly vomited. “I remembered then that we had been told that a good soldier kills without thinking of his adversary as a human being - the very moment he sees him as fellow man, he’s no longer a good soldier.”
There was worse. Private W Underwood of the 1st Canadian Division describes French Zouaves, in their blue coats and red trousers, apparently running in terror from the Germans. They pushed through the Canadians, who were so disgusted they shot at them. In fact, they were fleeing gas.
The familiar set pieces are here: Kitchener’s New Army sent into the slaughter of the Somme in 1916; Passchendaele, where you either survived relatively unscathed or died, because the wounded drowned in the mud; Gallipoli, where the Australians and Turks were so close that they could chat with each other, and there was so little space that one account tells of having to use a dead Turk as a table.
There are fresh angles on familiar tales. We have all heard of women giving white feathers to men out of uniform, often soldiers on leave; I had not realised how they targeted young boys who were below military age. Not all of those who lied about their age were joining up out of patriotic eagerness: many were virtually forced into it. Even telling the recruiting sergeant you were under age did not necessarily work.
There are plenty of vignettes: Winston Churchill arriving to take command of a battalion wearing a French helmet and bringing an immense amount of luggage, including a bath; the soldier who sipped his tot of rum only to find that someone had swapped it for strong detergent, which killed him; or the soldier who swapped the water in his bottle for fresh milk, and found himself looking after a woman and baby who desperately needed - well, milk.
One nurse watched the coffin of the Boer War hero Field Marshal Lord Roberts being carried on to the quayside at Boulogne. There was no such ceremony for the smart, soldierly guardsman who caught dysentery: within a week it had reduced him to a fetid wreck, unable to stand; he drowned in his own excrement.
Sean Lang is head of history at Hills Road sixth-form college, Cambridge
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