The Last Full Measure (33 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
THE STASIS OF
trench warfare encouraged a special breed of killers. As in the trenches around Petersburg in the American Civil War, snipers took advantage of their victims’ vulnerability through the carelessness brought on by boredom or inexperience. In one two-week period in December 1915, for example, British troops sustained 3,285 casualties, of which about 25 percent were in all probability head and neck sniper wounds.
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George Coppard writes of his mate’s death:
Lulled by the quietness, someone would be foolish and carelessly linger with his head above the top of the parapet. Then, like a puppet whose strings have suddenly snapped, he crashes to the bottom of the trench. There is no gradual falling over, but instant collapse. A Jerry sniper with a telescopic sighted rifle, nicely positioned behind the aperture of an armoured plate, has lain patiently, for hours perhaps, watching our parapet for the slightest movement. His shot is successful and a Tommy is breathing his last, not quite lifeless, but dying. The back of the cranium is gone, and the grey brain flecked with red is splashed out. A pal of mine named Bill Bailey … died in this way.
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Even in the front line there was something shocking about the way reassuring domesticity could be instantly and bloodily smashed. Coppard continues, “There were four of us in a short section of trench, Bailey, Marshall, myself and another. It was early morning and stand-to was over. The fire was going nicely and the bacon was sizzling. I was sitting on the fire-step and just as I was about to tuck in Bill crashed to the ground. I’ll never forget the sound of that shot as it found its billet.” After taking Bill
to the first-aid post (where he shortly died), Coppard and his pals returned to the trench “ravenous with hunger.” They were hoping to reassemble the shards of normalcy, but the “bacon and bread was on the fire-step, but covered with dirt and pieces of Bill’s brain.”
Ernst Jünger would have recognized Coppard’s unnerving experience of unreality. As he describes:
A sentry collapses, streaming blood. Shot in the head. His comrades rip the bandage roll out of his tunic and get him bandaged up. “There’s no point, Bill.” “Come on, he’s still breathing, isn’t he?” Then the stretcher-bearers come along, to carry him to the dressing-station. The stretcher poles collide with the corners of the fire-bays. No sooner has the man disappeared than everything is back to the way it was before. Someone spreads a few shovelfuls of earth over the red puddle, and everyone goes back to whatever he was doing before. Only a new recruit maybe leans against the revetement, looking a little green about the gills. He is endeavouring to put it all together. Such an incredibly brutal assault, so sudden, with no warning given. It can’t be possible, can’t be real. Poor fellow, if only you knew what was in store for you.
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Sniping takes place in its own ambiguous world. On the one hand it is an act of individual skill, but on the other its anonymity robs it of the kudos usually attached to individual combat. It is valued but reviled, admired but detested:
The German snipers observed and fired from under the eaves of houses, so it was most difficult to locate them. When a parapet was blown in by a shell, or when a trench caved in with the rain where the men had undercut it for shelter, the sniper looked out for the repair or rescue party. The want of communication trenches, which there had not been time to
get on with, and the places where the sections had not yet dug far out enough to join up, were the causes of many casualties. Snipers covered their working parties; worse still they covered attacks, preventing our men lining the parapet until the attackers were close up. Only in the dark could food and ammunition be brought up and the wounded and dead be taken down.
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Although the Allies decried German sniping as “underhanded,” they recognized that it was superior to their own, not only in equipment such as superb telescopic sights but also in training, particularly concealment:
The Germans had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy, who had been firing all day [a fatal error] from a shell-hole between the lines. He wore a sort of cape made of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown, and his rifle was also green-fringed. A number of empty cartridges lay beside him [another fatal giveaway of position], and his cap bore the special oak-leaf badge. Few of our battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights than we did, and bullet-proof steel loop-holes. Also a system by which snipers were kept for months in the same sector until they knew all the loop-holes and shallow places in our trenches, and the tracks that our ration parties used above-ground by night, and where our traverses occurred, and so on, better than most of us did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches, with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to study the German trench-geography. But at least we counted on getting rid of the unprofessional sniper. Later we secured an elephant-gun
that could send a bullet through enemy loop-holes; and if we failed to locate the loop-hole of a persistent sniper, we tried to dislodge him with a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the artillery.
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Some snipers would draw a moral line (or at least recognize it). A Canadian marksman confided in the military historian Philip Haythornthwaite that after he had shot a German who was relieving himself in the latrine he felt he was no better than an assassin.
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And Robert Graves, indulging in some amateur sniping near Cuinchy, was disarmed by a sudden revulsion: “While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. ‘Here, take this. You’re a much better shot than I am.’ He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.”
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WHAT WAS LEFT
of the warrior code, with its emphasis on individual combat, on a death in some way chosen? There were, of course, many acts of great valor and ennobling self-sacrifice, and there was a kind of individual combat during trench raiding. But the general tenor of warfare had become long-distance, mechanical, anonymous, processed. Nevertheless, within this process there was a need to reassert the power of the individual warrior—and as in all previous wars since the introduction of the gun and cannon, it was the blade that represented the last vestige of the heroic duel. And in World War I that heroic blade was embodied in the bayonet.
The bayonet was the figurative and literal point of the frontal attack. It was by the physical ejection of the enemy from his
frontline trenches that defenses could be breached, which reserves could exploit, and victory would be won. The attack with the bayonet also represented the moral fiber of the soldier, and cold steel embodied the aggressive élan that would force the great unlocking of the stalemate.
On the eve of the war, Field Marshal Foch, for example, declared that “the French Army, returning to its traditions, no longer knows any other law than the offensive.… All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme with the firm resolution to charge the enemy with the bayonet, in order to destroy him.… This result can only be obtained at the price of bloody sacrifices. Any other conception ought to be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war.”
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It was an emphatic reaffirmation of the offensive doctrine of France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic armies and would echo Danton’s famous invocation of the supremacy of the
attaque a l’outrance: “Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace et la France est sauvée.”
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The Germans adhered to the same flamboyant heroic credo: “When the decision to assault originates from the commanders in the rear, notice thereof is given by sounding the signal ‘fix bayonets.’ … As soon as the leading line is to form for the assault, all the trumpeters sound the signal ‘forward, double time,’ all the drummers beat the drums, and all parts of the force throw themselves with the greatest determination upon the enemy.… When immediately in front of the enemy, the men should charge with bayonet and, with a cheer, penetrate the position.”
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(
German Infantry Regulations
, 1899)
The problem proved to be getting to the trenches in the first place, and the frontal attack became the focal point for what many saw as the murderous failure of general staffs in their relentless pursuit of breakthrough. Ironically, in a war that had become literally and metaphorically deadlocked, the strategic obsession, shared by all the general staffs, was with movement and fluidity. Siegfried Sassoon recalls the clash between the tactical realities that inhibited
fluid warfare and the official line that insisted upon it: “The Fourth Army School was at Flixécourt.… Between Flixécourt and the War … there were more than thirty English miles. Mentally, the distance became immeasurable.… For instance, although I was closely acquainted with the mine-craters on the Fricourt sector, I would have welcomed a few practical hints on how to patrol those God-forsaken cavities. But the Army School instructors were all in favour of Open Warfare, which was sure to come soon, they said. They had learnt all about it in peacetime; it was essential that we should be taught to ‘think in terms of mobility.’ ”
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In the event, disastrous losses for all sides destroyed the possibility of the heroic in the old sense. The impressive extended-order frontal attacks that had characterized the earlier part of the war had to be modified in the face of unacceptable casualties. All the combatant armies on the Western Front developed versions of smaller-scale assault units, less impressive visually but much more pragmatic. Stand-off killing, particularly by artillery and machine guns, reduced the possibility of hand-to-hand fighting, and as a reflection, the incidence of bayonet-inflicted casualties was minuscule: .32 percent, for example, of one sample of 200,000 British casualties.
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Lord Moran notes: “Hand to hand fighting is vanishing out of war, and even veterans have never met cold steel, which was the way death came to the ancients. Once when I had a bayonet a few inches from my belly I was more frightened than by any shell, but it left nothing behind it. It went out of my mind, it would never happen again.”
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Nevertheless, there were strenuous attempts throughout the war to keep alive the “spirit” of bayonet fighting. The British
Manual of Bayonet Training
reminds soldiers that “the bayonet is essentially an offensive weapon. In a bayonet assault all ranks go forward to kill or be killed, and only those who have developed skill and strength by constant training will be able to kill. The spirit of the bayonet must be inculcated into all ranks, so that they
go forward with that aggressive determination and confidence born of continual practice.”
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Robert Graves describes the frenzied exhortations of the bayonet instructors at Amiens: “In bayonet-practice, the men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors’ faces were set in a permanently ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now! In at the belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes! … Naaoh! Anyone would think you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that!
Bite him, I say! Stick your teeth in him and worry him! Eat his heart out!
’ ”
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Most instructors themselves were, to use British Army parlance, “all mouth and trousers.” When pressed, the officer in charge of British bayonet training admitted that very few had actually been involved in real bayonet fighting. “But we don’t insist on their telling the strict truth when asked that question.”
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Bayonet fighting may have been rare, but it could be ruthlessly effective.
*
Gunner officer P. J. Campbell recalled entering a
German trench that had just been captured: “The field in front of me looked utterly peaceful, but only fifty yards away there was that trench, full of dead Germans … the grey faces, the poor twisted bodies. They had been bayoneted by the Canadians in the morning, you can’t take prisoners in a front-line trench in an attack.”
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Private Stephen Graham remembered that such ruthlessness had been insisted on when clearing an enemy trench: “The second bayonet man kills the wounded.… You cannot afford to be encumbered by wounded enemies lying at your feet.”
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Like most hand-to-hand combat, it was more often than not messy rather than parade-ground clean: “I saw one man single me out and come at me with his bayonet. He made a lunge at my chest, and, as I guarded, his bayonet glanced aside and wounded me in the hip; but I managed to jab him in the left arm and get him on the ground, and when he was there I hammered him on the head with the butt-end of my rifle.”
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