This appeared in a signed article by one of our head officials in London, forwarded to me by Mother last week. It was entitled ‘Our Splendid Women’. I wondered then how many people comfortably reading it over the breakfast table realized what that ‘all cleaning’ entailed. None, I should imagine; much less the writer of the muck. Certainly we ourselves had no idea before we got there.
I wonder afresh as I don my overalls and rubber boots. I know what to expect this morning, remembering that poor wretched soul I carried on my last trek to Number Thirteen, who will be buried by one of us today.
I am nearly sick on the spot at the sight greeting me, but I have no time for squeamishness. I have Commandant’s bus in addition to my own to get through.
The snow is coming down pretty heavily now, the waterproof sheet over my bonnet is full, and the red cross over the front of the driving seat totally obscured by a white pall. Blue-nosed, blue-overalled drivers in knee-high waterproof boots are diligently carrying buckets of water and getting out cloths in readiness for the great attack. The smell of disinfectant is everywhere. No one speaks much. It is a wretched morning and the less one talks the sooner one will be out of these whirling flakes.
The inside of my ambulance is at last cleared of its filth. I swill it with water. More water. Now with disinfectant. I examine it minutely. Commandant’s 11 to 12 inspection is no idle formality. She goes over every square inch of each ambulance, inside and out, the engines are revved up, the tyre pressures tested, everything. With all her faults, she knows her job. If only she had a little heart, she would be an ideal woman for this sort of work. Why is it that women in authority almost invariably fall victims to megalomania?
Now for the engine. I start up after ten minutes’ hard work, for the engine is stone-cold. Something is wrong. A choked carburettor? I clean it. No better. She doesn’t seem to be getting the petrol quickly enough. A dirty feed? Or a plug? I test the plugs. They are OK. It must be the petrol pipe. It is. I listen. She is running sweetly enough now.
Tyres are all right, thank heaven. Perhaps a little more air in the offside rear? Done.
Helen Zenna Smith
MEG ROSOFF – Writer
In this passage from Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, our hero recounts the everyday horrors of war in a voice that is by turns poetic and matter-of-fact. Though not exactly cut out to be an officer, Tietjens finds himself at the front line trying to do the best for his men – with kindness, humour and a sort of relentless, weary patience. And we readers are right there with him, trudging through a waterlogged trench filled with icy sucking mud, severed limbs and blood – with no option but to carry on.
FROM A MAN COULD STAND UP, PART OF THE PARADE’S END TRILOGY
In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet . . . Swept your brain off its feet. Something else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul. Waiting for its C.O. to be squashed flat by the direct hit of a four point two before you got control again.
There was nothing to see; mad lights whirled over the black heavens. He moved along the mud of the trench. It amazed him to find that it was raining. In torrents. You imagined that the heavenly powers in decency suspended their activities at such moments. They didn’t! A Verey light or something extinguished that – not very efficient lightning, really. Just at that moment he fell on his nose at an angle of forty-five degrees against some squashed earth where, as he remembered, the parapet had been revetted. The trench had been squashed in, level with the outside ground. A pair of boots emerged from the pile of mud. How the deuce did the fellow get into that position?
Ford Madox Ford
HELEN SKELTON – Presenter and writer
Breakfast in our house was always a battle: my big brother picking bogeys out of his nose while I made a wall of cereal boxes between him and me. I must have thought that if he was out of sight, he’d be out of mind! Maybe I was just worried he would flick green slimy snot into my Coco Pops. Either way, it was the meal that set the tone for the day; the brother–sister bickering started at the breakfast table and didn’t end until bedtime.
It was frantic and chaotic, with Mam rushing us and repeating the time minute by minute. At eight a.m., three hours into his working day, my dad would usually join us for at least one round of bogey-dodging.
By the time we reached secondary-school age it was a family tradition and the most well-rehearsed family meal we had, although we didn’t know it at the time. It was a meal we took for granted, one we always knew would be laid out on the table, one so reliable and consistent that we could put on a side show around it. Breakfast since then always has and always will be my favourite meal of the day.
For me breakfast signals a new day and therefore a fresh start. Not for the soldiers speaking in Gibson’s poem. As it was for me, breakfast for them was a daily ritual; they describe it as one of those things you just do, apparently uninterrupted despite the imminent threat of death from overhead bullets. To me, the poem is an amazing example of how those soldiers just ‘got on with it’. They adapted their lives and routines to the crazy situation they were in. The reference to football, and jokes over who will win pending matches immediately stirs memories of school-bus conversations I overheard. In this poem they don’t seem like soliders fighting war and chalking up deaths with pride. They are lads, talking football over breakfast, which makes what happens next all the more shocking.
BREAKFAST
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Stainthorp played full-back instead
Of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
SUSAN COOPER – Author
My dad fought in the First World War when he was eighteen. He was lucky; he was wounded and sent home, instead of being killed like my uncle and almost a million other young Englishmen. He talked about life in the trenches only once, and you wouldn’t want to hear what he said.
The writer-artist David Jones was in the trenches too, at the same age. His astonishing prose poem In Parenthesis tells about it, through his own eyes and those of soldiers back through the ages. Painting with words and punctuation, scoring them like music, he gives a grindingly vivid picture of the daily life of men in that terrible war. And reminds us that all war is terrible.
FROM IN PARENTHESIS
They fell in after dark, greatcoats folded outside packs, and after the first mile you got uncomfortably hot under the rubber sheeting and with the halt you cooled and shivered; people didn’t talk much, and there was little sound at all, but what the weather made, when the feet marching, shuffled to a standstill. The gunfire from the south-east had become for them so normal an accompaniment as to be no longer noted, its cadences unheeded; but at the second halt you began to enquire of this new stillness on the night. Perhaps it was because of the lie of the land, or perhaps he’d beat it right out of hearing, or perhaps this lull were a space between, a breather for them. At all events, the wind bore no sound, other than itself, across the drenched land; or if that changing light as on each other night, danced, for a gunned piping, this hill’s bulk kept you uncertain.
But soon, you only but half-heard words of command, and your body conformed to those bodies about, and you slept upright, where these marched, because of the balm of this shower, of the darkness, of the measure of the beat of feet in unison . . .
* * *
It was largely his machine guns in Acid Copse that did it, and our own heavies firing by map reference, with all lines phut and no reliable liaison.
So you just lay where you were and shielded wh
at you could of your body.
It slackened a little and they try short rushes and you find yourself alone in a denseness of hazel-brush and body high bramble and between the bright interstices and multifarious green-stuff, grey textile, scarlet-edged goes and comes – and there is another withdrawing-heel from the thicket.
His light stick-bomb winged above your thorn-bush, and aged oak-timbers shiver and leaves shower like thrown blossom for a conqueror.
You tug at rusted pin —
it gives unexpectedly and your fingers pressed to release flange.
You loose the thing into the underbrush.
Dark-faceted iron oval lobs heavily to fungus-cushioned dank, wobbles under low leaf to lie, near where the heel drew out just now; and tough root-fibres boomerang to top-most green filigree and earth clods flung disturb fresh fragile shoots that brush the sky.
You huddle closer to your mossy bed
you make yourself scarce
you scramble forward and pretend not to see,
but ruby drops from young beech-sprigs –
are bright your hands and face.
And the other one cries from the breaking-buckthorn.
He calls for Elsa, for Manuela
for the parish priest of Burkersdorf in Saxe Altenburg.
You grab his dropt stick-bomb as you go, but somehow you don’t fancy it and anyway you forget how it works. You definitely like the coloured label on the handle, you throw it to the tall wood-weeds.
So double detonations, back and fro like well-played-up-to-service at a net, mark left and right the forcing of the groves.
But there where a small pathway winds and sun shafts play, a dozen of them walk toward, they come in file, their lifted arms like Jansenist Redeemers, who would save, at least, themselves. Some come furtively who peer sideways, inquisitive of their captors, and one hides a face twisted for intolerable pain and one other casts about him, acutely, as who would take his opportunity, but for the most part they come as sleepwalkers whose bodies go unbidden of the mind, without malevolence, seeking only rest . . .
David Jones
ANTONY BEEVOR – Historian
Perhaps more than any other period in history, the subject of the First World War has become deeply divided. On one side a popular impression of events has built up, partly influenced by Oh! What a Lovely War, Blackadder and War Horse. This version of a totally futile and unnecessary war concentrates on the fate of the individual, with death and squalor in the trenches, the terrible moonscape of no man’s land, ‘going over the top’, the war poets, the executions of deserters, and the incompetence of generals mounting doomed attacks.
Most professional historians, on the other hand, while they do not in any way deny the massive tragedy and the suffering, see the war and its origins from a rather different angle.
Once the chain reaction of ultimatum and mobilization had started after the shooting in Sarajevo with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia, the network of alliances which had been created to prevent war only widened the conflagration. Britain, the last to join, simply could not stay out of the conflict: her traditional strategy since the eighteenth century had always been to prevent a single power from dominating the continent of Europe.
What the popular version of the First World War overlooks is the fact that the small professional British Army which went to war in 1914 was extremely effective, and fought well to prevent a lightning German victory. But the war of movement rapidly changed to a static war of attrition, because both sides had failed to see that the invention of barbed wire and machine guns had swung the advantage overwhelmingly against the attacker. And yet political and economic pressures in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Russia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the Ottoman Empire demanded victory as soon as possible. This is where the tragedy developed. And it was doomed to continue until either one side or the other could invent new weapons to break the stranglehold of the defence, or collapse from moral or economic exhaustion.
The Kitchener armies assembled in 1915 were a sacrificial stopgap in a war of mass mobilization. Unlike the continental powers, with their conscripted armies and vast trained reserves, Britain in peacetime had maintained only a small army of volunteers. Hard lessons had to be learned. By 1918 the British Army had become a far more professional organization than its peacetime predecessor. Its victory in August 1918 during Field Marshal Haig’s great counterattack, following the massive Ludendorff offensive, has often been overlooked. It was deliberately ignored later by Nazi propagandists when they claimed that the German Army had never been defeated in the field, only stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists.
Kitchener armies were all-volunteer armies, created by Horatio Kitchener, Secretary of State for War.
Here are some excerpts written in August 1918 by my grandfather-in-law, Duff Cooper, a young lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards who won the Distinguished Service Order, the next decoration to a Victoria Cross. Later, he was the only senior minister to resign from the government in protest over Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement.
Letter to his fiancée, Lady Diana Manners, 25 August 1918, BEF France
In fact Duff, an inveterate gambler, could have boasted a great deal more about his next encounter with the enemy for which he won his medal, but he ascribed it to pure luck.
A detailed account appeared in his diary dated 20 August.
Morale in the British Army soared during these successes, and by late September German soldiers were surrendering in droves. The Nazi ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend could not have been more dishonest.
RICHARD CURTIS – Writer
When Ben Elton and I decided to write a situation comedy, full of stupid jokes, about the First World War, we knew it was quite an odd thing to do – to try to be funny about this epic human tragedy. But we did a little research, and found out that there had been quite a lot of comedy in the situation, the very first time that Englishmen of all classes found themselves living so close to each other – and also lots of black comedy in the stupidity of the war. But from the very start, we agreed that it had to end badly. That it had to end in sorrow. That everyone had to die. Had anyone said that they wanted a happy ending, we wouldn’t have written anything at all. And so these are the very final pages of the show – when Blackadder has done everything he can to get out alive, but is finally going to have to go over the top. I have been told that over ninety per cent of all letters ever written to us about the show have been about the effect of these final two minutes.
FROM BLACKADDER GOES FORTH: ‘GOODBYEEE’
DARLING: I say, listen – our guns have stopped. GEORGE: You don’t think . . .
BALDRICK: Perhaps the war’s over. Perhaps it’s peace!
GEORGE: Hurrah! The big nobs have got round a table and yanked the iron out of the fire.
DARLING: Thank God. We lived through it – The Great War, 1914-1917.
ALL THREE: Hip hip hurray!
BLACKADDER: I’m afraid not. The guns have stopped because we are about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They feel it’s far more sporting to let the Germans do it.
GEORGE: So, we are, in fact, going over. This is, as they say, ‘it’?
BLACKADDER: Yes, unless I can think of something very quickly.
A command is heard: ‘Company, one pace forward.’ They all take one step forward.
BALDRICK: There’s a nasty splinter on that ladder, sir. A bloke could hurt himself on that.
A call: ‘Stand ready.’ They put their hands on the ladders, ready to climb over.
BALDRICK: I have a plan, sir.
BLACKADDER: Really, Baldrick, a cunning and subtle one?
BALDRICK: Yes, sir.
BLACKADDER: As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?
BALDRICK: Yes, sir.
Another call is heard: ‘On the signal, Company will advance!’
BLACKADDER: Well I’m afra
id it’s too late. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?
A whistle goes. He looks at Baldrick.
BLACKADDER: Good luck, everyone.
Blackadder blows his whistle. There is a roar of voices – everyone leaps up the ladders. As they rise above the sandbags they are met by thunderous machine-gun fire.
Blackadder, Baldrick, George and Darling run on, brandishing their handguns. They will not get far.
Silence falls. Our soldiers fade away. No Man’s Land turns slowly into a peaceful field of poppies. The only sound is that of a bird, singing sweetly.
Captain Edmund Blackadder and Private S. Baldrick
ANTHONY HOROWITZ – Author
There were many great poets of the First World War and you’ll find them well represented in this book. However, I’ve chosen a song that has no known author. It seems to have sprung up from nowhere and was sung in the trenches by ordinary soldiers who had to deal with the horrors of modern warfare. Mustard gas would actually burn the flesh off their bones – it was a vile weapon – but here it’s treated with very dark humour. That seems to me to be quite extraordinarily courageous in itself.
If you get a chance, see Richard Attenborough’s brilliant anti-war film, Oh! What a Lovely War, which uses many of these songs. They need to be heard rather than read. They are echoes of history, as potent now as they were then, and one can only hope we never have to hear them again.
BOMBED LAST NIGHT