Common clay

NEWS OF THE execution of Edith Cavell dominated the week’s news in the West. All the ingredients of martyrology were there – an undefended woman, of attested faith and almost inhuman courage, felled by a volley of rifle fire in a German shooting range in occupied Brussels.

Her gallantry was incontestable, not that this alone would be enough to stop florid distortions and imaginative reconstructions concerning her last days and hours. Where facts could not be obtained or even fabricated, purple prose now sufficed: “Nothing, probably, can now brand with fouler infamy the German name, stained as it is by all the damning items in its past record, from Louvain to the Lusitania down to the murder of an English nurse.”   “Our enemy has incurred the disgust and loathing of all honourable and merciful men in Europe and America.” The Daily Telegraph, at the suggestion of one of its readers, who sent in a £5 donation, set up a new “Shilling Fund” to raise funds to erect a monument to Miss Cavell, “ruthlessly butchered by the Huns”. It was an appeal which resulted eventually in the erection of the statue which still stands in St Martin’s Place in central London. Meanwhile, on 22nd October, Pope Benedict XV and King Alfonso of Spain, with others, lodged an appeal against the death sentence still standing against some of Cavell’s fellow defendants.

In military terms, the great narratives of the week were on Fronts less familiar to Anglo-Saxons. In Italy, the third Battle for Isonzo continued back and forth over the treacherous terrain of the steep mountain sides on the Carso, such as Monte San Mrzli and Monte Sei Busi. Often the Austrians could stop Italian assaults by simply rolling huge rocks down which knocked the attackers off or by triggering avalanches, but Italian aeroplanes damaged Austrian morale, at least, by repeated bombardments of their positions. Some reported that Italians were inventing their own armour for self-protection:[they] “appeared almost like foot soldiers of the Middle Ages. They wore large steel helmets… and heavy grey-green breast armour”. The fact that such exotica was discovered by an examination of Italian corpses pointed to the armour’s limited efficacy.

The Serb plight, already dire, worsened considerably with the arrival of Bulgaria into the war. Having already been chased out of Belgrade by Austrians troops, Serbia now had to face attack from the north by the latest recruit to the Central Powers. By 23rd October, Uskub and Kladovo in the south of the country had been sacrificed to the new enemy. In the midst of so much woe, the allure of pan-Slavism must have rung very hollow, especially since the Russians were also failing badly. On 21st October, the Germans captured the bank of the River Dvina, ten miles east of Riga, advanced into west Chartorysk and by 23rd October were storming Illukst. These gains were not uncontested or without cost, but the direction of travel was unambiguously eastward.

Less mobile, inevitably, the war in France and Belgium this week continued to offer every kind of excitement and terror. Nurse Edith Appleton continued to record minutely the brutal reality of men in extremis. Her descriptions of mental impairment risk sounding callous to a later generations, but her verbal brusqueness was of its time, and has no business anyway being confused with the quality of her care.

October 20.  …We have three men suffering from shock. One is stone deaf, the second is not deaf but dumb and has a nervous tremor, while the third sits with the expression of a thoughtful monkey and keeps saying… ‘remember playing football — but after that…’ I think what happened after that was that the shell broke up his football pitch and buried him. We have eight cases left over from the convoy — five very bad. One, who has his right arm and foot and left fore-finger amputated for gangrene, is now mad from septic poisoning. There’s another abdominal who is dying slowly, one more who I think will die, and two head cases — both as mad as hatters.

Nurse Edith’s diary continued:

October 24. We had a very young officer admitted this evening, very badly torn and wounded in a painful part of his anatomy, and heavily under morphia. The man in No.2 Ward who had 15 inches of gut taken away is dying — he is quite mad, poor fellow, and looks terrible. Major Ray came to tea, and he’s been to Pop [Poperinghe] today. He says the place is deserted, but people still live in a few of the houses, although the place is shelled every day. I believe the man who was Mayor there in our day has been taken away as a spy.

October 25.   We should have been taking in today, but after getting only a few ambulance-loads we were stopped — instead No.2 was taking in. This afternoon I heard why — the King is coming on Wednesday and will be taken to No.2 as it is the senior casualty clearing station and they want to have plenty of patients in when he comes.

The Battle of Loos was now consigned to history (and to the scrutiny of anxious military experts). In its wake, many soldiers from all armies were not averse to striking up a modus vivendi with the enemy, as Private James Racine of the Seaforth Highlanders remembered. He was stationed in a quiet area of the Somme, part of a company which had taken over very good trenches from the French.

The latter had been accustomed to exchange light artillery fire with the Germans at 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. This was Racine’s first time up the front line and he recalled:

At dawn on the first day, we found on our barbed wire a piece of paper, on which was written a request that two or three of our men would, at a given time, proceed half-way across No Man’s Land and meet a similar number of Germans in order to exchange periodicals and souvenirs, as the French had been accustomed to do. At noon, our interpreter and two men met the enemy half way. The heads of the troops on both sides were above the parapets and no firing took place.

That sounded alright, but it could not last. “Later when we left the trenches,” Racine remembered, “we were paraded by the colonel and severely reprimanded: ‘It is impossible to fight a man with one hand and give him chocolate with the other.’” One can see the colonel’s point.

A man killed or wounded in battle was a tragedy, but it was the random catstrophes of war which could seem most cruel and pointless. On 23rd October, HM Transport SS Marquette, en route to Salonika from Alexandria, was sunk by a torpedo from the German submarine, U-35 , just 35 miles short of the safety offered by the anti-submarine nets off the shore at Salonika. Seven hundred and forty-one people were on board, including soldiers from the Royal Field Artillery and members of the New Zealand Medical Corps, plus vitally needed horses, mules and ammunition. The ship sank in thirteen minutes and 167 lives were lost, including 32 New Zealanders, of whom ten were nurses. New Zealanders had plenty to grieve about already, given the scale of their losses at Gallipoli. In this ghastly episode, the bodycount had mounted when lifeboats were badly lowered, one even fell onto another already in the water tipping out its occupants. One of the nurses, Mary Gorman, saw her friend, Catherine Fox, flung into the sea and, knowing she couldn’t swim, dived in after her; neither was seen again.

Public outrage erupted. This time, however, it could not reasonably be confined to the enemy: the medical teams had been conveyed on a troop transport – and a troop transport was a legitimate target. Why, it was demanded, had they not instead been on a marked hospital ship? It was a blunder the government vowed never to repeat. The submarine, U-35, under its commander Lieutenant-Commander Waldemar Kophamel, would become the most successful of the war, sinking 244 ships.

Some crumb of comfort in the region came with the despatch to Gallipoli of General Sir Charles Monro, replacement commander to the recently ejected Sir Ian Hamilton. Formally appointed on 20th October, Monro was considered competent and pragmatic and, more importantly, had already proved himself on the Western Front in command of the First Army and the Third Army. A “Westerner” – that is, one who believed the war would be won or lost in France – he was also quite capable of standing up to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. In this, as in a good deal else, Monro stood in sharp contrast to his unhappy predecessor. He refused to be hustled away to Gallipoli until he had checked all the reports and had several meetings with Kitchener who was still vacillating about the campaign’s future.

To go or to stay? That was the question. Kitchener, according to Hamilton (not an impartial witness, perhaps) was “a master of expedients” who “hated organisation with all his primitive heart and soul, because it cramped his style”. As disillusion with the Dardanelles campaign had grown, he was being pressed for more decisiveness and clarity about his strategy. Those with a vested interest in the decision were not always prepared to leave well alone, either. Monro’s Chief of Staff, General Lynden-Bell described the new commander’s departure from London at 6 a.m.: “Just as the train was about to start Winston Churchill rushed along the platform, threw a bundle of papers into our carriage and shouted ‘Don’t forget if you evacuate it will be the biggest disaster since Corunna!’”’

Fifteen months into the war and with no end in sight, it was hardly surprising that some scalps were being sought. A visit by King George V to France from 21st October must have appeared as a morale-building occasion – which indeed it was. But it also helped to set the scene for a further sweeping of the Augean stables.

This was, in fact, His Majesty’s second visit since the war began. On this occasion he stayed at the Château de la Jumelle at Aire from 21st October. Haig was invited to dinner on 24th October and later recalled:

After dinner, the King asked me to come to his room and asked me about Sir J French’s leadership. I told him that the time to have removed French was after the Retreat, because he had so mismanaged matters, and shown in the handling of the small Expeditionary Force in the Field a great ignorance of the essential principles of war. Since then, during the trench warfare, the Army had grown larger and I thought at first there was no great scope for French to go wrong. I have therefore done my utmost to stop criticisms and make matters run smoothly. But French’s handling of the reserves in the last battle, his obstinacy, and conceit, showed his incapacity, and it seemed to me impossible for anyone to prevent him doing the same things again. I therefore thought strongly, that, for the sake of the Empire, French ought to be removed. I, personally, was ready to do my duty in any capacity, and of course would serve under anyone who was chosen for his military skill to be C-in-C. The King said he had seen Generals Gough and Haking that afternoon, and that they had told him startling truths of French’s unfitness for the command. General Robertson also told him that it was “impossible to deal with French, his mind was never the same for two consecutive minutes”.

The following day, the King wrote to his Private Secretary, Stamfordham, “The troops here are all right but I find that several of the most important Generals have entirely lost confidence in the C.-in-C. and they assured me that it was universal & that he must go, otherwise we shall never win this war. This has been my opinion for some time.”

Asquith had not yet received a direct challenge to his premiership but he was evidently demoralised. He was also apparently unwell and was another one who seemed to be reviewing his position. On the early morning of 19th October he told his wife: “I feel very ill, and have come to the reluctant conclusion I must give up.” Such a prospect enraged her, and into her diary she poured vitriol on Asquith’s cabinet colleagues whose squabbles, she claimed, had sapped his energy and morale – as, she believed, had the constant carping from newspapers like The Times and Daily Mail. Doctors recommended that the Prime Minister “starve and sleep”, which he did for almost 36 hours.

That same day, his daughter-in-law Cynthia heard of the death of her brother Yvo Charteris, aged only 19. A Grenadier Guard, he was trying to take a German trench at Loos, leading his men over the top, when he was shot and “died instantly from four bullets”. He had only been in France for three weeks. Cynthia’s diary recorded her anguish:

Darling, darling little Yvo — the perfect child and youth. How can one not be going to see him again?…He was the greatest luxury in one’s life with his overwhelming charm — his brilliancy, sweetness, and that supernatural sympathy and understanding. One looked forward to him as an ever-increasing joy. There was something so expectant about him with his interest and amusement in life, it was like someone just sitting down to a wonderful banquet. How can one believe it, that it should be the object to kill Yvo? That such a joy-dispenser should have been put out of the world on purpose. For the first time I felt the full mad horror of the war…

There can be no reason to doubt either the intensity of her grief, or its reasonableness. It would be comforting to reflect that war, with its shared privations, dangers and sorrows, served as a great leveller, but this was far from universally true.  During this time Private John Gallishaw, a Newfoundlander, found himself on a hospital ship having been evacuated from Suvla due to illness. His experience of lying close to a wounded British officer was one which made the “mother country” seem hateful:

The eyes of the man were large with pain. I smiled at him, but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he turned over on his side so he could face away from me. As he did, the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap the star of a Second Lieutenant. I had committed an unpardonable sin: I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that he was not made from common clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, his eye met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. I have often laughed at the incident since, but there in that boat I was boiling with rage. Not a word had passed between us, but his expression in turning away had been eloquent. I cursed him and the system that produced him.

Considerations of class appeared uncomfortably often  – although seldom so biliously. This was the same week as Raymond Asquith, the Prime Minister’s eldest son, who had just been posted to join the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards in France, recorded his initial experiences before he reached the Front. As an officer, he shared a comfortable billet with hot baths, champagne, roast partridge and bridge all available, but once on the move it was a diet of hard boiled eggs and condensed milk. He felt mortified when they reached Rouen as his men were locked up in a dingy shed with some Indian troops while he and the company commander managed hot baths, a shave and a drunken lunch of lobsters and brandy.