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But if the British had finally succeeded in breaking through, the staff would have sent the army into a disaster far greater than that of a failed attack. With patient, maladroit negligence they would have concocted humiliation as well as tragedy for the men. Something in their bone-heads must have warned them of the dangers in pushing on when the gap was opened, of getting a few divisions through into open country where they would be at the mercy of quick-moving German reserves, to be surrounded and hammered into annihilation. The army would lose so many men that they would be in no position to play at war with them much longer. The higher echelons of the staff might then have their own bodies threatened by shot and shell, and that was never their idea at all.

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Too high a standard was set for the men in the line by officers who never went near it. The front was regarded by the General Staff as a temporary fixture which was liable to alter at any time, for when the big push came and the breakthrough happened, no more trenches would be needed because the troops would lead the staff in a fine dash towards Potsdam. And it was liable to come at any minute, for one never knew when the Germans would crack.

Consequently, the British trenches were rarely allowed to become too comfortable for fear the soldiers would get soft, or that they wouldn't want to leave them when told to get up and attack the Germans. They must never be corrupted by the defensive spirit while one more useless sacrifice could be wrung from them. In 1917 the Russian Army voted with its feet for peace by getting out of the line as fast as it could. The British Army on the Somme and at Passchendaele voted with its corpses for death.

The staff must have been a preening, self-conscious lot, and imagined every soldier to be the same, for they made sure that their positions were always overlooked by the Germans. They liked being chiked at from hilltops and ridges. All along the front, from the high dunes of the Belgian sea-coast, south via the hills near Ypres, the Messines Ridge, Vimy Ridge, and the uplands before Bapaume, it was indeed a theatre of war to the Germans, who were invariably permitted by the gallant British staff to have the best seats in it.

The British Army was used as a battering ram against an unbreakable door. The soldiers who formed it looked bitterly at high ground up which they would have to advance. Every year of the war they were led out on an annual bloodbath, and though the door of the German defences creaked and cracked, it never burst open.

In spite of the French troubles at Verdun, the British should not have attacked for at least another two years, so that the New Army could have been trained to the standard of its opponents and, more important, so that its officers could have been properly instructed. The German war machine, dangerous as it was, could have been slowly bled to death by the many Allies, instead of being continually and suicidally attacked.

More sensibly, the British Army should have gone on to the defensive in the spring of 1915, and at the same time tried to make peace. The Germans would not have accepted the terms of withdrawal to their own frontiers at that time, but perhaps after two more years of stalemate they might have seen it as the only possible course. But the British believed in the suicidal maxim that the best defence lies in the attack—which it does, but only if you can be sure of winning. Otherwise it leads to frustration, reaction, and stubbornness—this latter a fatal quality in the British character when it is given a free run, for it crushes fresh thought, destroys flexibility, and scoffs at improvisation.

More than two years were to go by before Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash showed how an attack could be made without incurring massive casualties—in the offensive before Amiens by the Australians and Canadians on August 8th, 1918. Monash, if any man can be singled out for such an honour, was the person responsible for Ludendorff's cry that ‘August 8th was the blackest day of the German Army in the history of the war'. A few more generals with the intellect of Monash might have saved the British Army hundreds of thousands of casualties, and brought some kind of victory to it as well. But such people were rare, and the fools and criminals were too many.

Monash made his men train in combination with the actual tank crews before they went into battle together. When the attack opened and his men moved forward he arranged for ammunition to be dropped by parachute. The artillery barrage was only to begin on the day of the attack, and not a week before.

It was as if the longer the casuality lists became, the closer the staff must have thought they were to wearing down the Germans, and to victory. It never came in the sense they sought it, not finally until 1945, when the Bolshevism they loathed had had twenty-five years to stiffen the Russian character which was said in 1917 to have let the Allies down so badly. The Germans were finally finished off as a military nation at Stalingrad and Kursk.

The British battalion commanders in the First World War did not like the uncomfortable mud, but death and replacements made them feel they were actually getting somewhere. Raids and minor attacks were constantly launched to keep up the spirits of their men and foster the tigerish grit of aggression in them. But as soon as they had to stop much of this, in the eerie winter of 1917–18, and go on the defensive because they really had no more men to throw away, the Germans came back and broke through with comparative ease, on March 21st, 1918.

Haig, Britain's number one war criminal, expected the Germans to advance in this attack at the same slow pace of his own clumsily-planned assaults. The remnants of the Fifth Army were hardly able to save themselves because it had been insisted that the British soldiers should have no training in the art of retreat. By this time the army was so weakened in morale that it could not be trusted to do it properly. If it couldn't attack, then it had to fight and die where it stood.

This senseless edict took away their chance of life, for tens of thousands were killed. In actual fact the British Army excelled in the art of retreat—as in the fighting withdrawal of 136 miles in thirteen days from Mons in 1914, when the small British Expeditionary Forced faced several Germany Army corps which attempted to envelop and destroy it. The retreat to Dunkirk in the Second World War, and the subsequent evacuation, was a great military feat.

With encouragement and planning a similar operation might have been repeated in 1918, but there was panic and rout in what was left of the Fifth Army as it fell back—with the usual acts of great and unquestionable bravery. Discipline cracked, and only the French divisions, recently recovered from their own mutinies, saved the British from disaster.

Brute force was used to bring the soldiers to heel. Redcaps and officers held gangs of stragglers at gunpoint to herd them back into the fight. Not all casualties were caused by the Germans. The full story of the retreat has yet to be written, though it probably never will be. Many old scores were settled in the confusion. Men shot their own officers and sergeant-majors with more readiness than usual—though one heard of this happening during the rest of the war as well, such frequent tales that there must have been truth in them.

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Most of those who came back from the war did not want to talk about it, were embarrassed if one questioned them, became furtive in their recollections, as if they had taken part in something shameful.

It was left to the self-confident, extrovert, unimaginative commanding officers to arrange for the military histories of their units to be written, perhaps in order to wipe away some of the shame that they might otherwise have felt. Men I spoke to in childhood were savagely wry: ‘Never again. They only sent us to France because they wanted to get us killed.' Not for them the regimental histories, to pore over with their hearts that had been steeped in the bitter realism of war. If they could have bothered with any reminiscences at all they might have preferred the highlighted accounts of disillusioned poets who were, after all, humanly closer to them.

They were sour and sad because they had been dragged into war by the foetid, super-efficient ruling-class machine that for a thousand years had perfected its grip on their souls—but which did not know how to win a war when it came to fighting one, or how to stop it when the blood-bill ran too high. And the men were angrier at the fact that they had allowed themselves to be betrayed, final proof that their manhood had gone and, with it, that supreme self-confidence which had only become apparent to them when they had already offered themselves up to the war, by which time it was too late.

To give the impression, as history books do, that the British nation volunteered for the war ‘as one man' is false. Perhaps one man can do so. After one man, another will follow, and even if the time gap is infinitesimal, it cannot be said that they went to the recruiting centres together—though it was to the advantage of government propagandists to have the population believe that this was so. I would like to think that one followed another like sheep, or that a hundred men were paid by the War Office to stand outside a recruiting centre and have their photographs taken, than that they sprang to it like automatons.

All sorts of tricks and pressures were employed to get men into the army in the two years before conscription came. Those of a certain class who did not hurry to join up finally capitulated when nanny met them in the street and handed them a white feather for cowardice. My Uncle Frederick, who said that this became quite common, was offered one on the top deck of a tram by an elderly woman. Instead of blushing with shame he gave her a violent push: ‘Leave me alone, you filthy-minded old butcher!'

Then he made his way off the tram expecting to be pursued by howls of ‘universal execration' from other passengers, but they were embarrassed and silent, so that he walked down the steps unmolested.

This nanny appeared to have mistaken him for some type which he clearly was not. They seemed determined, he told me, to get their revenge on those young gentlemen whom they had been forced to spoil and mollycoddle as infants. They also possessed more than a residue of spite against the parents they had been bullied by, and retaliated now by hurrying their pet sons into the trenches—or any sons they could get their hands on, for that matter. It was one more example, he added, of how war puts the final touch of degradation on certain people in whom it has already got a fair grip. Not that this was meant to malign the women. Far from it. Men did the fighting, after all.

In war it is the worst of a country that persuades the best men to die. It is easier to deceive the best than the worst. But if it is true that the best men are fools and go with ease, while the worst are cunning and find it easy to hold back, what else can war be but an utterly sure method of destroying a country? Uncle Frederick argued against this, and said that any who went deserved exactly what they got. I was inclined to take his word for it, for he himself never put on any uniform, and so bolstered my faith in humanity. He thought it was a case of the old wanting their revenge against the young. Those young men who fight and come back will then grow up to revere the values of the old who made sure they went—so the old in their deadly wisdom fondly imagine. And who can say they are wrong? The geriatrics stay behind to cheer them on, while the less senile put their black-hearted experience into smoothing out the paths that lead to the splintered sinews and dereliction of the battlefield.

One does not want to be unjust to those who took part in the war, but I do not see why the dead need war memorials, since they are already dead and so have no more requirements of this world. Perhaps the living want them more, to try and justify the feeling of guilt they have towards the dead, the guilt that eats at the living because they survived. No dishonour is done to the dead by wanting to see all war memorials destroyed. As for survivors still sound in wind and limb, they wouldn't want them either if they hadn't been worked on to desire them by those self-same people who manipulated their sentiments and got them into the war in the first place.

What about the maimed, blind, gassed, and limbless who, after all, paid the most? The only real voice they have left is that which enables them to cry out now and again for a living pension or pittance with which to sustain themselves. I feel sure that, knowing what it is to be maimed for a lifetime, they would not go into that war or any war if they could have their lives over again.

One might say, in ranting against the awful waste and slaughter, that the officers and members of the government, the priests, scholars, and authors who promoted the enterprise, are no longer alive and here to listen, so why shout? And if they were, it would make no difference, because they would not hear.

Yet people exactly like them are still here today and would do the same again—conditions permitting—in different ways, using other means, if given the chance. Every time it happens it seems as if it has never happened before. The same people are still either crushing or perverting the people. One must resist all authority, regimentation, law, and dehumanizing sameness—whether it comes from a government itself, or the backside of its soul called the silent majority. One can never say: ‘All that sort of thing is finished'—because nothing is ever finished without eternal vigilance and united action when the ugly head of unthinking patriotism is raised.

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The loud voices of the birds told me it would soon be light, but I hadn't really been asleep, due to an unexplained sharp click from the dashboard of the car that disturbed my brain every few minutes of the short and chilly night.

I thought it came from the clock but couldn't be sure. It was a coma rather than good slumber. Huge lorries roared along the motorway by which I was parked, going to Lille or Paris, and taking a few minutes to cross the battlefield of the Somme, some of whose acres were now buried under this broad, swathing highway.

Stirring myself, I took a gulp of brandy. It was half past three, with a faint light in the east, and I thought that a dawn attack at this time of the summer would have meant no rest at all, men dying in a half dream as they stumbled forward, or only waking to the pain of being wounded.