English patriotism was still a force in 1914. On the first day of the war, my mother’s three brothers, and my father and his two brothers, all joined up together, in the Artists’ Rifles. On the first day of the second world war, which I remember well, there were some similarities, but they were superficial. Again, my elder brother joined immediately. But the mood was resignation, not enthusiasm. There was no rejoicing, no talk of a new and better world: just a despairing attempt to preserve what was left of an unsatisfactory old one.
The truth is, the Great War knocked the stuffing out of the British. They have never been the same since, collectively. Of the 722,000 killed, the vast majority were volunteers, overwhelmingly young: the eager elite. Adam Hochschild writes: ‘Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.’ Over 41,000 had one or more limbs cut off, another 10,000 were blinded, and 65,000 were receiving treatment for shell-shock ten years after the war. My father’s case was typical. Wounded three times, and gassed, he did not actually die until 1943, but it was the result of what happened to him in Flanders. He never spoke about the trenches. None of them did. It was too horrible to recall.
Speaking for the fallen, Kipling wrote:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
That was true. Pre-war ‘secret diplomacy’ got us into the war in the first place. The British people were lied to throughout, not least by Asquith. The generals lied to the troops about their suicidal offensives. On the Western Front the British army was commanded, in succession, by two second-rate cavalry generals, French and Haig. The latter, in particular, was a mass-killer, who grandly lived throughout in a comfortable, safe château, and never went within rifle-shot of the Front if he could help it. It was the only war in which the commanders-in-chief were never in any personal danger.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.