The Last Full Measure (29 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Officers were twice as likely to be killed as the men they led.
11
An anonymous British junior officer wrote in 1917: “I am certainly not the same as I was a year ago.… After all, just imagine my life out here: the chances of surviving the next battle for us platoon commanders is about 4 to 1 against!”
12
In the German army the infantry casualty rate as a whole was 13.9 percent, but for the officer class it was a staggering 75.5 percent.
13
During a disastrous attack by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at La Bassée in 1915, of the 16 officers who led their men, 14 were killed (87.5 percent).
14
Corporal Hodges of the Royal Fusiliers had 5 company commanders between April and November 1918, and of those, 4 were killed. One, he recalled, “was not with us long for me to get to know his name. He was the one who was wounded and then killed with stretcher-bearers.”
15
AND HOW WERE
soldiers killed? What weaponry, rolling off the production lines in unprecedentedly prodigious quantities, did them in? And what strategies and tactics—so intricately enmeshed in that great web of political goals, civilian expectations, weapons capabilities, available manpower, topography—led men to their deaths? Death could come in many ways, as Private Bernard Livermore remembered: “Death from a sniper’s bullet, death from a rifle grenade, death from a Minnie [sometimes referred to as a “moaning Minnie,” slang for
minenwerfer
, a German mortar used to throw a 100- to 200-pound shell into opposing trenches] or a toffee apple [stick grenade]; death from shrapnel (possibly from our own guns) or from gas, if the wind were in the right direction. Death also might come from bayonet or nail-studded cosh if the Bosche raided our lines.”
16
The greatest killer, however, was artillery, hence the shockingly high proportion of men whose bodies were never recovered and who have no known grave. More than 300,000 British and British Empire dead of the Western Front—40 percent of the total killed there—were never found.
17
On the Menin Gate memorial at Ypres alone, the names of 54,896 British and Empire dead whose bodies were never recovered are recorded. The great vaulted memorial, designed in 1921, proved too small to carry all the names of the unrecovered dead, so those killed after August 15, 1917, were recorded on the Memorial to the Missing at Tyne Cot cemetery. On the memorial at Thiepval there are 73,367 names of men killed who have no known grave, and that encompasses losses during the fighting on the Somme (1915–1918). They were either obliterated or churned into the earth by remorseless artillery fire.
Captain J. C. Dunn, the much-decorated medical officer of the Second Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, describes the transition
from death by small arms, which was preponderant in the early phase of the war, to artillery as the primary cause as the war progressed. In October 1914, he records, “Most of the deaths were from rifle-fire, shells caused comparatively few.” A year later, however, he observes that “the wounds on this front are mostly multiple and often horrible, being nearly all caused by shell or mortar-bomb or grenade.”
18
Artillery was a much more efficient killer than infantry. According to Paddy Griffith’s calculations, the British infantry lost one casualty (wounded as well as killed) for every 0.5 it caused, whereas artillery lost one casualty for every 10 it caused.
19
Taking the war overall, small arms, particularly machine guns, accounted for the next largest segment of deaths. In one representative British division, 58 percent fell to artillery, 37 percent to small arms, and 5 percent to other agents (bombs, gas, and bayonets, for example).
20
Of those killed by bullets, about half fell to machine-gun fire, and of all casualties about 25 percent were inflicted by machine-gun fire.
21
Although it caused fewer deaths than artillery, the machine gun became the exemplar of killing on an industrial scale. By 1914 both Britain and Germany were manufacturing machine guns based on Hiram Maxim’s patents. Vickers received its license in 1892; Krupp the following year. Leading up to the war the supply of machine guns to the British Army had been minuscule (only eleven per year from 1904).
22
The officer class of European armies, drawn largely from the landed gentry, was deeply rooted in the preindustrial era. Mechanized warfare lacked the heroic attributes of the rifle and especially the bayonet, and so the antediluvians “clung to their old beliefs in the centrality of man and the decisiveness of personal courage and individual behaviour.”
23
Although it was a tension that played out all through the war, nothing could prevent the massive industrialization of combat killing. In 1914, Germany deployed 4,900 machine guns (of which most, 4,000, were on the Western Front); France had 2,500, and the British Expeditionary
Force (BEF) could muster the grand total of 108. By war’s end, however, Vickers had made not only 71,350 Maxim-style machine guns but also 133,000 Lewis guns. (Weighing 30 pounds, including a forty-seven-round drum magazine, they were the first truly effective light machine guns.)
24
Machine guns were just the job for relatively unskilled “operators.” The mass levies of citizen-soldiers who replaced the small cadre of professionals (mostly killed off by early 1915) did not have the handcrafted rifle skills, honed over years of practice, of the old sweats (thirty rounds in one minute, all on target at 300 yards, was not unusual) and so “power … passed from the artist to the artisan.”
25
That is not to say that the operators did not take pride in their machines. George Coppard remembered his Vickers almost fondly: “This weapon proved to be most successful, being highly efficient, reliable, compact and reasonably light. The tripod was the heaviest component, weighing about 50 pounds; the gun itself weighed 28 pounds without water [water-cooling extended firing time]. With a gun in good tune the rate of fire was well over 600 rounds per minute. There were normally six men in a gun team. Number One was leader and fired the gun, while Number Two controlled the entry of ammo belts into the feed-block. Number Three maintained a supply of ammo to Number Two, and Numbers Four to Six were reserves and carriers.”
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If those six men had been employed as riflemen, each one would have been able to get off approximately twelve rounds per minute for a total of seventy-two rounds: a very poor exchange compared with their machine-gun function. In 1914, machine guns (in the British army two per battalion, twelve battalions to a division) could deliver the equivalent of 9,120 rifles per division. By the end of the war they could deliver the equivalent of 38,000.
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In the beginning of the war the Germans had about the same ratio of machine guns to infantry as did the BEF, but they
tended to concentrate their guns in separate companies rather than allocating them to infantry battalions under infantry control as the British did until the formation of the Machine Gun Corps in October 1915. At the hands of the Germans the British learned the very bitter lesson of the effectiveness of machine guns deployed in concentration and manned by troops trained specifically in their use. At the battle of Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915, for instance, the Second Scottish Rifles went into the attack preceded by an intensive artillery barrage intended to knock out any resistance in the German front trench:
Ferrers was first out from “B” company, his monocle in his eye and his sword in his hand. As the guns stopped firing there was a moment of silence. Then the guns started again, firing behind the German lines.… Almost at the same moment came another noise, the whip and crack of the enemy machine guns opening up with deadly effect. From the intensity of their fire, and its accuracy, it was clear that the shelling had not been as effective as expected.… As the attack progressed the German positions which did most damage were two machine gun posts in front of the Middlesex [the Second Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment was an extension of the attacking line of which the Second Scottish Rifles was a part]. Not only did they virtually wipe out the 2nd Middlesex [battalion sizes varied, but about 600 would be average] with frontal fire, but they caused many of the losses in the 2nd Scottish Rifles with deadly enfilade, or flanking fire [meaning, instead of firing into the attackers frontally, they were firing into their flanks and therefore able to hit a great many more men].
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The bloody effectiveness of even a single machine gun is recorded in Robert Graves’s classic
Good-bye to All That
(1929).
The Royal Welch Fusiliers (in which Graves was a courageous officer) also found themselves side by side with the Middlesex in an attack near La Bassée on September 25, 1915:
It had been agreed to advance by platoon rushes with supporting fire. When his [a Royal Welch officer’s] platoon had gone about twenty yards, he signalled them to lie down and open covering fire. The din was tremendous. He saw the platoon on his left flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed to hear. He jumped up from the shell-hole, wave and signalled “Forward!”
Nobody strirred.
He shouted: “You bloody cowards, are you leaving me to go on alone?”
His platoon-sergeant, groaning with a broken shoulder, gasped: “Not cowards, Sir. Willing enough. But they’re all f—ing dead.” The Pope’s Nose machine-gun, traversing, had caught them as they rose to the whistle.
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THE ARTILLERY SPOKE
its own language, in which sinuous and seductive whispering was interspersed with a vocabulary of screaming brutality. Frederic Manning, a private on the Somme who went on to write one of the best books about the war, the novel
Her Privates We
(1930), describes how the “shells streamed overhead, sighing, whining, and whimpering for blood; the upper air fluttered with them … with its increasing roar another shell leaped towards them, and they cowered under the wrath. There was the enormous grunt of its eruption, the sweeping of harp-strings, and part of the trench wall collapsed inwards, burying some men in the landslide.”
30
Captain Dunn remembered how
the “big howitzer coughed huskily from time to time, and high overhead its shell sizzled and soughed eerily beneath the stillness in the starry sky, to burst so far [away] that the report was muffled and there was no echo although sounds carried far.”
31
“It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them,” writes Ernst Jünger in his classic memoir,
Storm of Steel
(1920), “because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death.… Imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung, now it’s cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it’s struck the post, and the splinters are flying—that’s what it’s like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position.”
32
It was as well to listen carefully and learn the shells’ language. One’s life could depend on it. P. J. Campbell, a young gunnery officer on the Western Front, was lucky enough to have been given a primer by a more experienced colleague: “He told me how to distinguish shells by the sound they made, and how to tell whether they were going to burst at a safe distance or not. ‘When you hear a slow rather tired noise,’ he said, ‘you’ve got no need to worry, that one’s not going to hurt you. But if it’s a rumbling noise like this,’ and he imitated the noise that a child makes, playing at trains by himself, ‘then you run to the nearest dug-out. And if you hear a sudden whistling scream getting louder and louder and coming straight at you, then you fall flat on the ground and pray, you’ve no time for anything else.’ ”
33
Soldiers became almost affectionately familiar with the characteristics of different types of ordnance. The lethal had become their area of expertise, and they discussed it in the same way they would the relative merits and demerits of different automobiles. The French soldier and novelist Henri Barbusse recalled just such a conversation among aficionados:
