Not such a cock-up after all?
Graham Stewart
MUD, BLOOD AND POPPYCOCK by Gordon Corrigan Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99, pp. 431. ISBN 0304359556 For many, perhaps most people, .futility' seems to be the word that best sums up Britain's martial endeavours on the Western Front. Few believe throwing away the flower of the nation's manhood for the gain of a few square miles of Flanders bog was worth it. They wonder why the generals did not notice this failure and try something else. If people today can remember anything about the reasons for going to war in 1914 then they can be forgiven for not getting excited about dying so that Belgium might be neutral. Those who know rather more about Germany's expansionist war aims shrug and point out that the war's destabilising legacy made the world a more dangerous place and encouraged an even more aggressive man in uniform. New Age pacifists, hip satirists and reactionary Edwardian summer sentimentalists all agree: the Great War came at too high a price.
Upon this settled verdict, Gordon Corrigan launches a barrage of unremitting ferocity. 'The Great War is an episode in our history, not an emotional experience, he writes. In this he makes an important point, for there is a danger that we are beginning to regard the Western Front as a justifiable cause for national victimhood — a British version of what other peoples feel when they recall the slave trade, the potato famine or the Holocaust.
It was certainly not a lovely war, but the level of exposure to its horrors must be put in perspective. Unlike the French, who at first let their divisions fight for long periods, the British practised rotation. A battalion could expect to spend no more than ten days a month in the trenches, of which perhaps five days would be in the most exposed forward lines. At other times they were enjoying rations and conditions that compared favourably with what the less fortunate of them left behind in Blighty. And to those for whom the experience did prove too much the army was not always unfeeling. Very few were shot at dawn for other than the most serious — and repeated — derelictions of duty. They were certainly not shot for suffering shell shock, a condition that, as Corrigan shows, the authorities did make concerted efforts to understand.
With the exception of a diversionary chapter on the strength of the American contribution in 1918, Mud, Blood and Poppycock focuses single-mindedly on the experience of the British army on the Western Front. Corrigan estimates that in the fighting around Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915 British and Empire troops may have fired about 400 rounds of rifle ammunition for every German they hit. Despite the familiar imagery of troops being mown down by machine-gun fire, over half of British casualties on the Western Front were caused by shelling from German artillery. The Tommies gave back as good as they got. The Somme offensive was launched with a bombardment of over one and a half million shells. This worked out at 71 for every yard of the German front.
The problem with the myriad of interesting statistics presented in this book is that — in keeping with Stalin's famous dictum — they reduce the power of individual tragedy. If the British forces killed in the war were marched in three ranks past the Cenotaph it would not take the widely claimed four and a half days. As a former officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles, Corrigan has done his paces, got out his calculator, and discovered it would only take one day, 15 hours and seven minutes. He also points out that since 80 per cent of Oxford and Cambridge students who enlisted in the war survived it, one can hardly talk of a lost generation. If I had to scratch an 'x' over every fifth bright, hopeful face on my college matriculation photograph, I might not be so sanguine.
Although many of his points are good. Corrigan overstates his case. If it is indeed true that rats were not a major problem, then we should have the evidence for this assertion in an endnote. Occasionally his opposition to any sign of namby-pambiness gives his eloquence a hectoring edge. There is no need to denigrate the war poets by claiming they were just writing for the money. Wilfred Owen was one of those who had published very little when he died in uniform serving his country.
Far from being commanded by heartless imbeciles. Corrigan maintains, 'the British army in 1918 was more professional, better organised and better led than it was in 1945'. A small volunteer army was success
fully transformed into a massive force. This army suffered significantly fewer casualties per head than the French or Germans, despite the latter having started with the advantage of peacetime conscription. It says something that, alone of the major combatants, the British troops never mutinied.
Marching in step with the important works of John Terraine, Corrigan argues that we should regard Haig as most Britons (including soldiers) regarded him in 1918 — as the general who won the war. He makes a good case for the necessity of the Somme and Passchendaele offensives even if his reasoning is sometimes based on consequences that were not intended in the original plan. In both cases, relieving the pressurised French became a priority. Britain was, at the end of the day, the junior partner on the Western Front.
Corrigan has fashioned a pugnacious case, stripping away many of the misunderstandings and falsehoods that have settled as if they were established truths in the popular imagination. But there is one telling statistic — quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War — he does not employ. Dividing war expenditure by enemy servicemen killed produces a bill of $36,485.48 per kill for the Entente powers but only $11,344.77 for Germany and her allies. It was an expensive victory in every sense.
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