Dispatches On War (Part IV)

A few minutes after seven thirty in the morning, on a July day in 1916, as the barrage from the British artillery lifted, the British troops along the Somme River, “went over the top” and started their much-anticipated attack. The first British regiments, to advance, walked in parade ground formation towards the German lines. A regiment led the attack by kicking a soccer ball, and promising to dine in the German trenches by nightfall. The Germans, who had weathered the attack, by hiding in their underground bunkers carved in the chalky limestone soil of the region, raced up to their positions as soon as the barrage lifted and the first waves of the British infantry approached. They waited till the British were within the range of their weapons and then opened fire. Entire British battalions and regiments were decimated. In some places, the German machine gun fire was so well interlocked that the dead British were heaped upon in rows and fell as they had marched - in perfect formation.

By dusk, the British had suspended the attack and had send out medical teams to retrieve the wounded and dying British soldiers. That day the British army suffered the greatest causalities in its entire history. 60,000 British soldiers would become causalities on the first day of the Battle of Somme. To give the reader a comparison, nearly 55,000 Americans, from both Confederate and Union armies, combined, would become causalities during the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863). It would take the Americans ten years to suffer 58,000 causalities during the Vietnam War.

[To fully comprehend the carnage of that first day, imagine 150 fully loaded Boeing 747s crashing in an area the size of Central Park in New York City, at a rate of one aircraft every thirteen minutes for a period lasting up to ten hours!]

The full scope of the disaster at Somme would be kept hidden from the British public till the end of the war. That day British innocence; the romantic ideals of war and glory would die, and a sense of disillusionment would forever color how the British, and the rest of the world, would look at war.

To the twentieth century mind, with its cynicism about the futility of war, the image of the British soldiers marching to their deaths remains incredible. Why, the question remains unanswered; did the average British soldier not rebel against the insanity of the occasion and refuse to follow orders. To answer that question, we have to understand the environment in which that particular British soldier grew up and the ideals of patriotism, valor and a sense of honor, which animated his personal ethos. He was born, like so many of his generation, in the twilight of the nineteenth century during the height of the British Empire. He grew up with the conviction that the empire was a legacy bequeathed to him by past generations and that its safety and security were his moral responsibility. It was a period of British imperialism colored by the poems of Rudyard Kipling and the popular ballads that urged the Englishmen to sing, “…to the Queen and her world wide fame and glory…”. He came of age in a period in which the Union Jack flew over three-quarters of the globe and the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, would boast to the world that the sun never could set upon the British Empire.

To study that generation through its verses and its poetry; its letters and personal thoughts, is to witness a unique event in a history of a nation and of the world itself. It was a generation that would go to war reciting the glory of British arms and in the end; it would repudiate those very same ideals of its childhood. It was a generation that would span the ancién régime of antebellum Europe and the new world, the world, which existed after the Great War and would influence the rest of twentieth century. The twentieth century, by most accounts, began on January 1, 1901, but in a physiological sense, the present century began on August 1, 1914 when the German armies invaded Belgium and the First World War started. Two events, beyond a doubt, ended the gilded age of nineteenth century and ushered in the sorrow of the last century. One was the First World War and the other was the sinking of the Titanic. When Titanic sank off the coast of Newfoundland, in 1912, it sounded the death knell of a way of life and it took to its watery grave the best embodiment of that period. Titanic’s sinking was a metaphorical demise of the old world and a reminder of a period; of a way of life the Belgian author, Emil Verhoeven, would wistfully remember as, “the man I used to be”.

The generation of British leaders, who would command the British soldiers in the Great War, were the products of its public schools and some of its finest universities and, because of that, their crimes in the eyes of the nation would be unpardonable. They were educated with a sense of responsibility and the idea that, “to whom much is given, much is expected” and their own sense of duty, to the nation, would preclude any notions of compromise. Their sense of obligation to the cause they were fighting for was not the result of Sandhurst or the parade grounds at Aldershot, but was a product of the playing fields of Harrow and Eton. The personal admonishment not to be the reason for others failure would be the creed of self-sacrifice which determined their perspectives on life and honor.

Henry Newbolt would write a poem, Vitaï Lampada (Torch of Life), which accurately portrayed their sense of duty:

The Gatling is jammed and the colonel is dead.
The sand of the desert is sodden red
With the blood of the square that broke…
And the river of death has brimmed its banks
And England is far and honour is, but a name…
Still, the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks:
Play up! Play up! Stand up and play the game!

Play the game. To the generation that came from the public schools of England, playing the game meant an obligation not to let their side down regardless of the costs involved. Since these were the same schoolboys who would pass through the hallowed halls of Sandhurst, they carried with them the games of Harrow, which would be played with such tragedy upon the fields of Flanders.

Another reason why the youth of Britain would suffer the terrible consequences of Somme, Ypres and Mons was the sense of imperialism that pervaded the society. Kipling, who was the poet laureate of the empire, publishing glorified accounts of British arms from his newspaper office, in Lahore, created a sense of war as a romantic past time and a glorious occupation for idle young men. Also, the British army had not fought a major war, the Crimean War of 1850-53 and the Boer War of 1899-1901 being exceptions, since the Battle of Waterloo. Between Waterloo and the Battle of Mons, the first clash of British and German armies in the Great War, was a period of ninety-nine years in which the British only fought ill equipped natives in colonial wars. No one in Britain, including its military, appreciated the changes wrought on the modern battlefield with the advent of the machine gun, self-repeating carbines and barbed wire. All these changes heralded the reality, that in a modern war, the lethality of the battlefield, aided by advances in science, would be unlike anything in the past.

The British sense of war, as glorified in the verses of Kipling, would be reinforced in popular melodies of the day. A song of the period, “Land of Hope and Glory”, whose blindly patriotic finale echoed the sentiments in the hearts of all Englishmen, would patriotically announce, “wider still and wider shall thy mighty bounds be set… God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier still”. When the First World War erupted and the British army would disembark in France to fight the Germans, it would still view a modern war through the prism of Kipling’s imperialism and the relative ease of a colonial campaign. Many Englishmen, like Rupert Brooke, who went off to war, would thank God, “for matching us with His hour”. Others, like Julian Grenfell, would compare war to a picnic, but without, “the objectlessness of a picnic”. It would be Rupert Brooke who would perhaps best capture the mood of his generation in going off to war. His tragic words now include some of the most memorable lines in the English language, “if I should die, think only this of me; that some corner of a foreign field will be forever England”. Words like Rupert Brooke’s were being heard all over England that fateful summer of 1914 and they were being sung in popular music halls in patriotic songs, like the words which encouraged the average Englishman, “…we do not want to lose you, but we still think that you should go…”

As the war would progress without an end in sight and with ever-increasing causality lists, the generation that had gone to war so cheerfully, would become morose and pessimistic. They would seriously question the utility of the war and the need to pay, a phrase coined by Vice-Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson while referring to causalities as, “the butcher’s bill”. The perceptions of an entire generation, about war, would change and they would, in personal letters, bitterly resent the fact they were dying for nothing and consider their deaths and the death of their compatriots as a sheer wastage of lives nullified in the name of national pride. Wilfred Owen, the greatest of all war poets, would pen his thoughts, which haunted his generation as they came to see the ugly brutality of war in the trenches, in a poem called “Anthem for a Doomed Youth”. He would, in his verse, ask the question that would become a lasting epitaph for a generation killed in the war, “what passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”

The Battle of Somme would have a profound influence on the British life and in a larger sense, how the preceding generations would view war, an outlook that would be our legacy. July 1, 1916 the day when the Battle of Somme was fought also began the decline of the British privileged classes. The idea, which proclaimed that, “the grammar schoolboys always know the best” after Somme would stand discredited. The British public’s confidence in the upper classes to lead them would be questioned and they since that day they would always look upon the privileged classes as being indifferent towards the ordinary person. That sentiment can still be seen in the British public’s opinion about the monarchy. An opinion that was formed long before Prince Charles’ infidelities with Camilla Parker-Bowles would ever surface in the newspapers or before the British public would be critical over the indifference of the House of Winsdor over the death of the “People’s Princess”.

The legacy of Somme would also be that it would forever change the way that we, the generations that came after the First World War, would look at war itself. The modern age’s cynicism about war would be born that day. The day the Battle of Somme was fought would be an important event in the evolution of human thought about war. Prior to Somme, war was seen in terms of glory and the romantic gloss of imperialism, which covered it, would wither and die in the aftermath of Somme. The modern world’s distrust about the efficacy of war and its revulsion at the costs of war, in human lives, would be inspired by the awful losses suffered at the Battle of Somme. In the words of Winston Churchill, it was at Somme, the hinge of popular opinion on the nature of war changed and forever altered our perceptions of war. Somme would influence the British mind to favor appeasement against Nazi Germany and it would move the Oxford Union to issue a resolution urging England’s youth not to fight for “God, King and Country”.

The sense of destruction, as experienced at Somme, would not be limited to the British, but would be universal. The Germans, who had gone to war signing, “Deutschland über alles” and “die Wacht am Rhein” – the watch on the Rhine, would be nostalgically remembering the words of another song after Somme, “ich hat’ ein kamaraden” (I had a friend). The Battle of Somme would influence a whole generation to hate war and their disgust at its insanity would find many forms of expressions. Two years later, when the war would end on November 11, 1918 at eleven minutes past eleven in the morning, the German High Command would issue its last official war communiqué simply stating, “nicht neues im westen” (no news in the west). A German veteran, Erich Maria Remarque, would take that and title his novel after it. The book would be translated into many languages, but it would always be remembered by its English title, “All Quite on the Western Front”. That book would become the universal rallying cry of a generation, against war, who remembered its horrors and wished to spare the coming generations of its futility.

Siegfried Sasson, a compatriot of Wilfred Owen, who had served on the Somme battlefield, would ask the question, “will it happen again?” He would, even, ask the generation which had survived the Great War, “have you forgotten yet” and then, in a poem called “To A Childless Mother”, he would pen the following lines:

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector…
The nights you waited and watched…
Do you remember…the stench
Of corpses rotting in the front of the front-line trench,
And dawn…chilled with a hopeless rain.

Do you remember the hour of din before the attack
And the anger, the blind compassion that sized and shook you…
As you looked into the doomed faces of your men
Do you remember the stretcher cases lurching back?

William Butler Yeats, would express his own loss of faith in the political institutions of England as, “those that I fight I do not hate and those that I guard I do not love”. Robert Graves, who also fought at the Battle of Somme, would come to hate England. England, according to him, was a hopeless place and he had lost, “all interest in my race”. After the war, Graves would go into a self-imposed exile where he would write his autobiography, “Goodbye To All That”. A book that would repudiate and denounce everything that England had once stood for. Graves would go on to write that shattered hopes and moribund cemeteries were the only monuments on the road to imperialism. He would never return to England, but die in the Spanish isle of Majorca some seventy years later still bitterly detesting England’s glory.

In our own generation, the ghost of Somme still haunts our perceptions of war. It can be seen in the words of many songwriters, the poets of our generation, notably Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame. Waters, who lost his father in the Second World War, would dedicate his album, The Final Cut, to his father’s memory. Sting, in his album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, in a song titled, “Children’s Crusade”, would compare the loss of English youth in Somme to the British youth dying as a result of drug use; a metaphor for a waste of human potential. In the modern English language, Somme has become the metaphor for a tragedy.

The Battle of Somme offers that unique event in which the views of an entire generation and through them, the world’s perspective on a human phenomenon, war, would change and would never be the same. Being an avid student interested in the causes of the First World War, I have always been interested in how humanity’s perceptions of war have changed. In the poetry of Kipling, Sasson, Graves, and Owen, one can see how we went from notions of accepting war to the idea of hating it and the catalyst that forever changed our minds was the Battle of Somme. Now days, most people do not even know what that battle was all about, nor do they understand why it was so important, but they all are influenced by it. It is the standard by which we judge war and reject it, because of what happened so long ago. It is the reason why we express our outrage against war and demand its extinction.

F. E. Manning once said that a man might rave against war, but war, amongst its myriad faces, could always turn to him one which was his own. Maybe, the reason that we, as a culture, worship so devoutly at the altar of death is, because wars are a reflection of our own sense of narcissism. The accountancy of war is simple and it is measured in lost lives, in ruined hopes and in unfulfilled dreams. It has no columns of credit to offset the rows of losses, which itemize its debits. Those losses are not only the lives forever silenced on the battlefield, but includes the sorrowful pain of a widow and the lonely heartache of an orphan. It is a landscape in Dante’s Inferno rained upon by burning steel and watered by blood. War is not a game to be played, by some ardent children desperate, for glory. War is a disease that kills and we should inoculate our children and our future generations against the evil of war, before it kills us all.

An ancient Greek, I forget his name, once said that in peacetime the sons bury their fathers and in war, the fathers bury their sons. As we embark upon the new millennium, we should never forget what Somme stands for and neither should we forget that ancient Greek’s words. This past century has seen enough fathers burying their sons. As members of humanity, we should not so cavalierly accept this obscenity masquerading as a necessity, but we should be outraged against it and we should rage, in our anger, against war, because if we do not destroy it, it will destroy us. Let us not, for the sake of those who died, ignore a truth so dearly bought and so richly paid for in such young lives.

I would like to end this crié d’coéur (a French expression that suggests a yearning; a cry of the heart) with a poem by Siegfried Sasson.


And still they come and go: and this is all I know--
That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show,
Where wild or listless faces flicker on their way,
With glad or grievous hearts I’ll never understand
Because time spins so fast, and they’ve no time to stay
Beyond the moment’s gesture of a lifted hand.

And still, between the shadow and the blinding flame,
The brave despair of men flings onward, ever the same
As in those doom-lit years that wait them, and have been…
And life is just a picture dancing on a screen.