Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (94 page)

Edouard Cœurdevey expressed bitterness at the everyday sight of officers in glittering cars hastening past long columns of wounded men who were obliged to trudge on foot to the nearest aid station – a matter of twelve miles on one occasion: ‘These gentlemen pass without one car stopping to pick up the most exhausted [casualties]. The major mustn’t be late for his roast!’ Alois Löwenstein described the same contempt of
Frontsoldaten
, facing shot and shell, towards the staff: ‘They are posted many km behind the front and man desks, telephones and ticker tapes. The horses of ordnance officers grow fat.’

Every intelligent man in the line was in some degree afflicted by fear, but some succumbed more visibly than others. ‘It is curious to see the eyes of a frightened man,’ wrote François Mayer. ‘They are mad with anguish and terror. These nasty shells are not worth the fear they inspire. Unless they achieve a direct hit, they are harmless. One hears their whistle a long way off, then counts to ten before the moment of their detonation.’ Ambulance driver Dorothie Feilding wrote scornfully about the inadequacies of some men under fire, notably a volunteer named Johnyson, in civilian life a land agent: ‘It’s odd how the mere sound of [a shell] crumples men up. It was that way with Johnyson from Dunchurch – the moment there was a “black maria” [German shell] in sight he got in a sort of faint & utterly collapsed & one of the other chauffeurs the same way.’

Beyond psychological burdens, there were plenty of physical ones. As winter tightened its grip, many of even the fittest young men began to suffer from rheumatism and trench foot, caused by living around the clock in sodden boots and socks, often wading to the knee or above in filthy water. Sick lists soared. Bronchial infections became commonplace, and sometimes fatal. Lice were no mere nuisance, but carriers of disease. ‘My darling, today is our seventh in the trenches,’ Sgt. Gustav Sack wrote from Hardecourt on 5 November. ‘We look like pigs in the proper meaning of the word, a layer of mud a centimetre thick – no exaggeration – sticks to greatcoats, tunics and trousers … If the disgusting newspapers say: “slowly gaining ground” that means we advance 50–60m[etres] towards the enemy by digging for two nights!’ Sack was a journalist, but he described himself recoiling from almost everything he read in German newspapers about the nobility of the war and the trench experience. He felt that he could never put pen to paper to describe what he had experienced in France: ‘all those who go around talking about “writing something great after witnessing war” are talking rubbish’.

On 24 December George Jeffreys wrote, on the morning after relieving a unit in the line during darkness: ‘I went round early. The water up to my waist in some places. Daylight showed our trenches to be very badly sited as well as full of water and mud … The country quite flat and featureless, and intersected with dykes … the Germans can overlook us … It took me over two hours getting along the line, wading a good bit of the way.’ Robert Harker was in the same condition: ‘It’s extraordinary out here at this game, we lose all accounts of time both the day of the week and date, it all seems to be reckoned by the way we go into the trenches and then come out for rest … The mud … is extraordinary. It has a lot of clay and mineral matter in it and it goes into a thick paste like bird-lime with tremendous suction in which feet stick. Five men in another section got stuck and bogged in a communication trench up to the firing line and it was 7 hours before 3 of them were got out … by kneeling on faggots out of a hedge and scraping the mud away from their legs and feet with our hands … The mud sticks on to one’s clothes, overcoat, trousers and equipment in half-inches of depth and we have almost double the weight to carry, it is almost impossible to keep one’s rifle in working order as it all gets coated and clogged.’ Harker endured several more months of this purgatory before death delivered him.

François Mayer began the autumn by writing cheerfully home to his wife: ‘We are happy, very well fed. Of course there are plenty of moaners –
grognards
– but I would say that men’s morale is generally better than it was at the start of this thing. Some violent socialists have passionately rediscovered patriotism.’ Only a few men had started to mutter about deserting, he said, though some Prussians in the opposing trenches did so, coming forward with raised hands and crying out, ‘
Vive la France! C’est atroce!
’ Interrogation revealed complaints of poor rations and ill-treatment by their officers. But as weeks went by and the weather worsened, Mayer’s spirits flagged along with those of millions of others. On 31 October he took part in an attack in which most of his company fell before the survivors were ordered to retreat: ‘It was then that our luck ran out. Scurrying back, all three of my
copains
were hit: Chabrier fell shot in the head; Dufour was wounded and died a few hours later; Blanc received three bullets in his haversack.’

Mayer found himself prey to a growing sense of futility, intensified by each new operation in which he participated. ‘Yesterday we made a feint attack to draw German reserves into our area,’ he wrote from Rosières, south-east of Amiens, on 29 November, ‘and thus assist a real attack near
Quesnoy-en-Sarterre. It was unenjoyable from my viewpoint. After our guns had put down several salvos on the enemy, he opened an intense fire after which ten men led by a sergeant advanced about sixty metres from our lines. This provoked a rain of incoming shrapnel. After about an hour, our ten men returned, but the enemy bombardment continued until evening. What was it all for? I don’t know. In the company, one man was killed and two wounded, for meagre results.’ Col. Wilfrid Abel-Smith was appalled to read Lord Kitchener’s prediction that the war would be protracted, observing disbelievingly, ‘It is impossible to believe that the world can stand such a thing for two years.’

All the armies found it necessary to employ sanctions to maintain discipline. When at last Frank Richards’s unit secured a respite from the line, its commanding officer exploited this to inflict extra route marches – delayed imposition of punishments given to all those, including officers, who had straggled – dropped out and fallen behind – during the retreat from Mons. Even a man who had taken part in a bayonet charge with another unit had to march, cursing profusely. In rest billets, the same martinet administered No. 1 Field Punishment to soldiers found guilty of disciplinary offences. Instead of being lashed to a wagon wheel – the usual procedure – the men were tied to railings outside a factory in Houplines. Local women gathered around, some to sympathise, others to mock. One man said he didn’t mind doing field punishment, ‘but he didn’t want a bloody lot of frog-eating bastards gaping at him’.

Every nation imposed some capital sentences for battlefield flight or desertion, though the Germans executed far fewer of their own men than did the allies. Lucien Laby witnessed the shooting of a Frenchman from a cyclists’ regiment, convicted of abandoning his post in the face of the enemy: ‘He dies courageously, unbuttoning his tunic and saying, “My dear comrades, aim at my breast not my head.”’ The victim refused a blindfold and shouted at the last, ‘Long live France! Long live Alsace!’ Edouard Beer described a hideously botched Belgian execution: two condemned men were lashed to posts, and at the order a ten-strong firing squad unleashed a volley. One victim fell, but when the doctor examined the other he found him still alive, and muttered to the officer in command, who in turn told off a corporal to deliver a
coup de grâce
. After a shot, the doctor checked the man again – and found him still clinging to life. This time the officer seized the corporal’s rifle and himself ended the wretched victim’s sufferings. Beer wrote: ‘The officers retired, the men cut down the corpses. All
were profoundly impressed. I heard one say, “Ah! I’d rather have my head blown off by a German shell than be ignominiously carved up by an incompetent brute.”’

Boredom and immobility prompted trench-dwellers to pursue whatever diversions they could contrive within the confines of unit positions. Frank Richards wrote: ‘A pukka old soldier’s Bible was his pack of cards.’ He and his mates played incessant games of Kitty Nap, Pontoon, Brag and Crown & Anchor. Sgt. Alf Brisley spent a week carving the regimental crest of the Hampshire Regiment into the chalk face of a quarry below the Chemin des Dames – French and German soldiers later made their own artistic contributions alongside his own. Edouard Cœurdevey marvelled at the spectacle of a dozen men engrossed in a makeshift game of bagatelle, professing indifference to spasmodic shells landing in the vicinity. At last a near-miss caused them to raise their heads, and one exclaimed irritably, ‘Those imbeciles are trying to wreck our game.’

Static warfare created a market for new skills. A well-known French painter named Guirand de Scévola, serving as an army telephonist, conceived the notion of camouflaging artillery with material designed explicitly to blend in with local terrain features – rocks, grass, trees. After the Marne he secured the support of Poincaré and Joffre for implementing his ideas. ‘I used the same methods as the cubists,’ he wrote later. He mobilised the assistance of fellow painters: Forain, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Albert Laurens, Abel Truchet, Devambez, Boussingault, Dufresne, Camoin, Jaulmes, Braque and Roger de la Fresnayne, together with the sculptors Despiau, Bouchard, Landowski. Camouflage became ubiquitous. André Mare taught the technique to the British, and kept notebooks in which he depicted his own masterpieces in watercolour: observation posts sited in artificial trees and faked ruins.

‘We no longer take heed of the dead – we care only for the living,’ wrote François Mayer on 28 November. ‘That is what debases this human sacrifice. No one has seen anything who has not seen war, eaten beside corpses on which the crows are preying, laughing and chatting with our comrades as we do so. It is utterly terrifying.’ Edouard Cœurdevey also noted this callousness: he came upon a German sitting upright against his rucksack, who had bled to death slowly enough to put a groundsheet over his head against the rain. ‘He had also had time to take from his overcoat a photograph of his young wife and two chubby little daughters.’ Cœurdevey was shocked that his own compatriots not merely declined to bother burying the German, but mocked his condition by drawing moustaches on the
figures in the photograph that his dead hands clutched. A French sergeant wrote to his wife in December: ‘during the pause at the front the stretcher-bearers went past carrying a dead man a few metres from us and while some looked to see who it was, others remained calmly playing cards as if nothing had happened’.

Sgt. Gustav Sack gazed out from his trench at Hardecourt on a vista of French corpses, a fortnight unburied, whose only merit was that night patrols could scavenge rations from their haversacks. ‘One opens the tins half-carelessly, half-shaking with disgust, then eats.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
. Dreadful, very dreadful. If only one could get drunk, mindlessly drunk!’ Trench walls, dug with such hard labour, collapsed in the relentless wet. When it rained long enough, dugout roofs likewise fell in, ‘so we can wallow like pigs’. Thoughtful men expressed unremitting revulsion at all that they saw around them. German gunner Lt. Adolf Spemann wrote from the Somme front on 1 November:

In this beautiful autumn light, the view across the plain is really pleasant, despite its uniformity. But everything is messed up, the landscape seamed for miles by ribbons of trenches and dugouts; one thinks of it as a single trench line stretching from Dunkirk to Verdun. The whole plain looks dead and empty … a few cows graze the fields; over there on enemy territory, you can see peasants ploughing and an occasional vehicle.

Tomorrow Thiepval church steeple is to be demolished. It is a longstanding aiming-point for French gunners, and thus endangers the whole position. Steeples are favoured observation posts, and thus special artillery targets. Charges are being laid in Pozières tower, too, to be detonated immediately in the event of an enemy barrage. Amid all the devastation before our eyes, we give hourly thanks that we brought this war into the enemy’s territory. If this was our homeland, how would those beasts treat it?

Alois Löwenstein echoed Spemann’s thoughts: ‘Poor inhabitants! I always think: thank goodness the war is not being fought in our country.’ The German military authorities contemplated the vast destruction already evident in France and Belgium, and recognised that when the war ended there would be a row about who was to blame. In December, OHL gave orders that occupied towns and buildings should be photographed, to show them intact. If they were later destroyed, Germany could prove that the allies were responsible.

Sigmund Freud, though a civilian, recognised the unprecedented savagery of the conflict: ‘It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless … It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population.’ The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Geneva, had a staff of just sixteen in September 1914, when the first list of French prisoners held in Germany was issued, which the ICRC was responsible for passing on to Paris. Thereafter, the organisation’s staff swelled with its responsibilities, to two hundred in October and 1,200 soon afterwards.

The ICRC became responsible for arranging visits by neutral monitors to all the belligerents’ prison camps. These inspectors reported that the Germans, French and British were fulfilling their humanitarian commitments to military PoWs – as the Austrians and Russians did not. In German camps, the French and Russian inmates cohabited quite amiably, giving each other language lessons and discussing their respective cultures. André Warnod, a French PoW, wrote somewhat idealistically that the shared experience ‘achieves a fine sort of internationalism from which the Germans are excluded and in which we feel one single heart beat and pulsate’. Alois Löwenstein reported home that wounded French prisoners were more popular than English ones because they showed their appreciation to their German nurses. By contrast the English, he claimed, were ‘rude and ungrateful’.