The Last Full Measure (31 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
On occasion, however, death by shrapnel could be quite particular and disconcertingly discriminating: “Lieutenant Julian Tyndale-Briscoe, regarding a 60-foot burst as little more than punctuation to his conversation, found that it mortally wounded an officer and the battery clerk: ‘They both died within a minute—very sad—they had only one [shrapnel] bullet each.’ ” Gerald Burgoyne recalled an incident where the medical officer of a Wiltshire battalion was bending down dressing a wound in a crowded aid post: “A piece [of shrapnel] entering the room killed the doctor at once. The room was crowded at the time, but he was the only person hit.”
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Artillery had a ravenous and capricious appetite that devoured men in body and spirit. Lord Moran describes the death of the soul of a man almost hit by a Jack Johnson (named after the great American boxer, presumably because it packed a wicked punch):
“It’s Sergeant Turner, sir.… You see, sir, it burst almost on top of him.… It’s a miracle, I says, as he’s here at all.”
I found the Sergeant standing in the trench. He looked at me as if he had something to say but he said nothing. His lip trembled and he was trying to keep his limbs still. He appeared dazed by what he had been through and by this end to everything … it was plain to me the game was up and he was done. When this sort of thing happens to a good fellow it is final.
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What the guns did not kill by commission they frequently did by omission. The constant complaint of the infantry was the failure of friendly artillery to destroy enemy barbed wire in preparation for an attack. George Coppard surveyed the failed attack around La Boiselle during the first day of the Somme battle:
Hundreds of dead, many of the 37th Brigade, were strung out like wreckage washed up to a high-water mark. Quite as many died on the enemy wire as on the ground, like fish caught in a net. They hung there in grotesque postures. Some looked as though they were praying: they had died on their knees and the wire had prevented their fall. From the way the bodies were equally spread out, whether lying on the wire or lying in front of it, it was clear that there were no gaps in the wire at the time of the attack. Concentrated machine-gun fire from sufficient guns to command every inch of the wire had done its terrible work.… Any Tommy could have told them that shell-fire lifts wire up and drops it down, often in a worse tangle than before.
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Back in 1915 at the battle of Loos, Sergeant Charles Lippett of the Queen’s Royal West Surreys had experienced much the same: “As we approached this wire I could see the bodies of men
hanging on it, obviously dead or badly wounded, and there were no gaps in it at all. Our artillery had not cut the wire, even firing 18-pounder shells at it. The shell could land in a certain spot and instead of cutting a neat swathe through the wire to allow the troops through, it just lifted great lumps of it up and made the confusion worse.… I couldn’t even see where the enemy trench was, the barbed wire was so thick and so deep.”
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P. J. Campbell knew very well what the problems were: “But most of all it was the wire in front of the trenches that was disconcerting, there was so much and wire was so hard to destroy. It was our job to destroy it, the field gunners’. We had to cut it up using shells that burst on percussion without making much of a hole, heavier guns could have destroyed the wire more effectively, but if they made big craters in the ground, then it was difficult for the infantry to advance.”
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The introduction of the 106 percussion fuse in 1917 went some way to rectifying the situation. Its horizontal blast not only cut wire but also reduced cratering, which in itself could be fatal to those too badly wounded to prevent themselves from drowning in the rain-filled shell holes.
Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan of the Royal Warwicks heard them at Passchendaele in 1917: “From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious to me that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into shell holes, and now the water was rising above them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning.”
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Henri Barbusse saw them in the Artois:
Their heads and arms are underwater, but you can see their backs with the leather of their equipment emerging on the surface of the pasty liquid, while their blue cloth trousers are blown up with the feet attached crosswise to these balloon
legs, like the rounded black feet stuck on the shapeless legs of clowns or puppets. From one sunken head the hair is standing upright like waterweed. Here there is a face almost emerging, its head stranded on the edge while the body vanishes into the murky depths. It is looking upwards, its eyes two white holes, its mouth one black one. The puffy yellow skin of this mask looks soft and wrinkled, like cold pastry.
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And if enemy shell fire was not sufficiently lethal, there was always the grotesquely misnamed “friendly fire.” The French general Alexandre Percin estimated that 75,000 French soldiers were killed by their own artillery.
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Badly made shells, often with loose driving bands (the soft metal strap around the belly of the shell that bit into the rifling and ensured proper propulsion), were common in the earlier years of the war. On February 27, 1915, the Royal Welch’s medical officer recorded, with understandable sarcasm, that “our covering battery fired four rounds somewhat as follows: into Nomansland, into our parapet, behind our line, on to a Company H.Q.; and then telephoned ‘Is that enough?’ ”
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On August 10, 1916, Lord Moran recorded a typical incident:
I met Burdett who had taken over “B” Company.… “It’s our God-damned guns. I can’t make out what the hell they are up to,” he exclaimed angrily. I pushed on down the trench and suddenly came upon the scene.… Shells were bursting all round and in the black smoke men were digging. Muffled appeals for help, very faint and distant came out of the earth and maddened the men who dug harder than ever, and some throwing their spades away burrowed feverishly with their hands like terriers.… We were afraid too of injuring those buried heads with the shovels and always through our minds went the thought that it might be too late. Then there was a terrific noise, everything vanished
for a moment, and when I could see again Dyson and the two men working beside him had disappeared. They were buried. And then as if they had achieved their purpose in blotting this boy suddenly the guns stopped.
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THOSE WHO SAW
the first release of poison gas on the Western Front—by the Germans on April 22, 1915,
*
on the northern sector of the Ypres Salient—could have been forgiven for imagining it no more than a distraction: “Two curious greenish-yellow clouds [chlorine] on the ground on either side of Langemarck in front of the German line. These clouds spread laterally, joining up, and moving before a light wind, became a bluish-white mist, such as is seen over water meadows on a frosty night.”
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Its effect, however, was far from attractive, and although it caused relatively few fatalities in comparison to those from other weapons (about 6,000 British, 9,000 German, and 8,000 French; the Russians would lose 56,000, mainly due to a lack of gas masks),
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it was regarded with horror and contempt as a dirty, underhanded way to conduct warfare.
There were four broad categories of gas: the lachrymators, or “tear gas,” which caused intense eye irritation but were not in themselves lethal; the sternutators, “sneeze gas,” which caused extreme nasal irritation but again were not in themselves fatal; suffocants, which attacked and corrupted the lungs and were highly dangerous—the most notorious being chlorine and phosgene; and vesicants, primarily “mustard gas,” which blistered the skin and, if inhaled, the respiratory tract.
In the early phase of the war, gas was released from tubes mounted in the front trench and, because its delivery depended on wind conditions, could be disconcertingly unpredictable. The German chlorine-gas attack on completely unprepared French colonial troops in April 1915 was immediately successful but not exploited. The first British gas attack, at Loos on September 25, 1915, could have been a disaster, with the gas blowing back into the British trenches, but providentially caused only seven “friendly” deaths.
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As the war progressed more sophisticated delivery systems were introduced, such as the mortar-type Livens projector (1917), which lobbed a whole drum of gas (its inventor, Captain W. H. Livens, “expressed the ambition of reducing the cost of killing Germans to a paltry sixteen shillings apiece”),
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and gas-filled shells fired by regular artillery. In response, gas masks were developed, ranging from the earliest crude pads soaked in urine to rubberized face masks attached to air filters, but they were often cumbersome and suffocatingly uncomfortable. In addition, irritant gases were often delivered in combinations that made wearing a mask extremely uncomfortable if they were inhaled, and lethal if the soldier removed his mask to get some relief.
Phosgene and mustard gas were particularly deadly because once they entered the lungs, they penetrated the cells rapidly and hydrolyzed into hydrochloric acid. The victims essentially drowned in an excess of their own body fluid or, in the case of mustard gas, could die from secondary complications caused by extensive burning. The postmortem examination of a victim of mustard-gas poisoning described the shocking damage:
CASE 9.—C. H. W., 101135, Pvt., R. A. F., 3 Kite Balloon Section. Died, October 23, 1918, at 7.05 a.m., at Base Hospital No. 2. Autopsy, two hours after death, by Capt. B. F. Weems, M.C.
Anatomical diagnosis
.-Extensive first and second degree burns of skin; acute conjunctivitis; membrano-ulcerative pharyngitis and tracheitis; laryngitis; membranous bronchitis; lobular pneumonia; congestion and edema [accumulation of fluid] of lungs; interstitial emphysema of lungs; acute fibrinous pleurisy, chronic fibrous pleurisy over right upper lobe; congestion of abdominal viscera; gas-shell wounds of both thighs.
External appearance
.-Extensive burns over the trunk and extremities and large, pale yellow blebs [liquid-filled blisters also called
bullae
] upon the anterior surface of both thighs, about the left knee, upon both forearms, and upon the neck and face. Besides these clear bullae, there are large areas of a peculiar dusky, pinkish-purple colour, in most cases adjacent to the bullae and having approximately the same distribution. The face is swollen and covered over the bearded portions by scabby exudate [body fluid]; the skin about both eyes is swollen and discoloured; there is purulent conjunctivitis. A mucopurulent exudate [fluid bubbling up from the lungs] issues from the nostrils. There is extensive gingivitis. Skin over scrotum and penis edematous and in part blistered.
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It is no wonder that gas victims sometimes pleaded for a merciful end. Pioneer Georg Zobel witnessed the effects of a British gas attack: “Here and there were men from other units who had been surprised by the gas. They sat or lay and vomited pieces of their corroded lungs. Horrible, this death! And, much as they implored us, nobody dared to give them the
coup de grâce
.”
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Gas was loathed by combatants not only for the appalling suffering it could cause but because it robbed soldiers of the chance to fight back. Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard was at Hill 60 outside
Ypres on May 1, 1915: “The scene that followed was heartbreaking. Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground in agony … I ran round at intervals and tied up a lot of men’s mouths, placed them in sitting positions, and organized parties to assist them.… When we found our men were dying from fumes we wanted to charge, but were not allowed to do so.… Had we lost as heavily while actually fighting we would have not cared as much, but our dear boys died like rats in a trap, instead of heroes as they all were.”
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Even the gas mask imposed its own suffocating dehumanization, and this is why, with its bugged-out eyepieces and external trachea, it became such a potent symbol for artists of the war. It seemed to represent men entrapped in a rubberized skull, screaming to get out: “The gas mask makes you feel only half a man,” wrote Alan Hanbury-Sparrow of the First Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment. “You can’t think; the air you breathe has been filtered of all save a few chemical substances. A man doesn’t live on what passes through the filter, he merely exists.”
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