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from the
Observer Sunday 1 July 2001
 No, it was not a
lovely war
The BBC's plans to recreate the horrors of trench warfare 85 years after the
slaughter on the Somme are a kitsch travesty
Geoffrey
Wheatcroft
LAST WEEK, DAVID
Ireland died at the age of 103, after spending the last 77 years of his life
in a mental hospital. He had never recovered from the Great War, which
grievously affected him. But then it could be said to have done that for all
of us.
He died just before
today’s eighty-fifth anniversary of what could well stand as the most
important date in British twentieth-century history, the first day of the
Battle of the Somme. For the first time ever in our history, a huge army on
the continental pattern had been raised. The New Army was an army of
volunteers, the greatest such there has ever been. Boys from the same mill
towns and mean streets joined up together, and the names they gave to their
units are deeply poignant still: the Leeds Pals, the Tyneside Irish, the
Grimsby Chums. They enlisted together, they trained together, they went into
battle together, and they died
together. On 1 July 1916, 13 British divisions attacked on a front less than
12 miles long. Waves of infantry. men, each carrying 66lbs of kit, marched
steadily towards German machine guns and mortars which were supposed,
wrongly, to have been destroyed by an artillery barrage.
By the end of that
day, almost 20,000 British soldiers had been killed. There were two
casualties for every yard of the front. Nine VCs were awarded, six of them
posthumously. An infantry battalion comprised around 800 officers and men:
34 battalions each suffered more than 500 casualties that day. The
Accrington Pals lost 585, the 10th West Yorkshires, 710.
This was much the
heaviest loss in a day sustained by the British Army, or any army, in that
war, or any war. Hut words and figures cannot convey the enormity of what
happened. The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan shows what is meant to be
a realistically bloodstained version of D-Day, but the fact is that there
were no more than 2,000 casualties all told, killed and wounded, on Omaha
Beach.
AN AUTHENTIC
re-enactment of the Somme would be intolerable. Anything remotely
approaching a realistic depiction of the carnage simply could not be shown.
It could scarcely be described even at the time. We speak tritely of
‘denial’, but the men who survived the Somme weren’t in denial, they
necessarily forgot what they had seen and heard —
an ear-splitting cacophony of machine-gun fire, bursting shells, and the
screams of the dying in order to stay sane. It was those like poor Ireland,
who couldn’t forget the Western Front, who did not survive mentally.
To all that was
added the knowledge that the attack had been a complete failure. Scarcely
any ground was gained on the first day, or even by November when General
Haig finally broke off the offensive after hundreds of thousands of
casualties. One of the supposed objectives for that first morning had been
the little town of Bapaume. It was still in German hands four months later.
But the further
significance of that day is how it, and the war, was remembered. First came
a period of profound loss and mourning, but also, paradoxically, of
oblivion. Cenotaph, Unknown Soldier, Armistice Day when the whole country
stopped for two minutes at ‘the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month’, were all part of a cult of sacrifice: the glorious dead
‘shall not grow old’ and had not died in vain.
Ten years after the
war, the mood suddenly changed. By an uncanny coincidence, all the books by
which the Great War is now remembered, by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon,
Edmund Blunden and Richard Aldington, came out in 1928-30. They told a quite
different story, of horrible, mindless suffering. In the following decade
more and more Englishmen came to believe that war was not only hellish but
futile. A generation had been brutally and needlessly sacrificed; never
again.
IN 1933, THE Oxford Union voted not
to fight for King and Country and the Government lost the East Fulham
by-election apparently in a vote against war. A determination never to see
the Somme repeated might have been all to the good, if its beneficiary
hadn’t been Hitler.In the end the British went reluctantly to war in 1939.
But although they were fighting a vastly more evil foe than the ‘Prussian
militarism’ of 1914, they did so with none of the New Army’s zest, and
certainly none of its readiness for blind sacrifice. British generals of the
Second World War were acutely aware that their soldiers would simply not go
through the same butchery. And that war left a serious question prosperous democracies would fight
wars at all any more.
In the 1960s Oh! What a Lovely War, books and films told the love-and-peace
generation of the horrors of the Great War. And in Vietnam, the greatest power on Earth found that its men
would not fight, even with trifling casualties by 1916 standards. A final legacy of
the Somme might have been the Balkans ‘campaign’ of two years ago, which
looked, as one sour old soldier said, like being the first war in history in which
only civilians were killed. We congratulate ourselves today on Milosevic’s
downfall, but how many casualties would Nato have endured to defeat him?
Finally, the memory of the Somme has been reduced to kitsch. The BBC
wants 25 young men to take part in a recreation of the Western Front. They will spend two weeks in a trench and
will be exposed to tear gas. According to the BBC, ‘each will play a real-life soldier
and will have no idea when he is going to die’: a ‘reality TV’ or virtual war which
would have seemed grotesque to those who knew the real thing.
Nor did any of David Ireland’s comrades
know when, they would die, only that very many of them would. Their fate was certainly sacrificial, and it
changed history. But not in the way that their commanders and rulers supposed.
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