I wrote a piece for the parish magazine of my home town, Sandwich in Kent, about Laurence Binyon’s visit there in 1921 (see www.stclementschurchsandwich.org.uk and follow links to ‘The Signal’), and I’ve just received my copy. The issue, for November, is dedicated in a most sensitive and balanced way to Remembrance — mainly of the fallen in the First World War, but in other wars too.
I must confess, though, that when I saw the cover I experienced not so much remembrance as ‘vivid remindment’, or ‘acute revisualisation’, or ‘painful re-enactment’.
The photo shows the beautiful little marble memorial in St Clement’s Church, ‘To the Glory of God and in loving memory of Parishioners and Members of the Congregation of this Church who gave their lives in the Great War 1914-1918.’ I ran my eye down the twenty-seven names and immediately recognised many of the surnames. Of course, I grew up with some of their close relatives. But what made me wince was suddenly recalling being with my grandfather, nearly sixty years ago, when he was talking to a friend he had been with in the First World War and they recalled some of these very men, whom they had known and who had not come back. I remember the silence after they named them, the strange way they looked into the distance, at ‘nothing’. I was too young then to understand, but I now vividly remember that silence and those looks.
I daresay my attitude towards the ‘Great War’ has involuntarily seeped through this blog since I started it in July. Despite David Owen’s fascinating new book, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906-1914, which argues that ‘war in 1914 was far from inevitable, and instead represented eight years of failed [British] diplomacy’, I am with Fritz Fischer, say, or Adrian Gregory, Max Hastings, Jeremy Paxman, Gary Sheffield and others, in believing that the war was unprovoked, planned aggression by the Kaiserreich. If democracy and liberalism were to survive in Europe (that means Britain too), the German army had to be defeated. We owe our freedom now to every single soldier who gave his life in the effort, mismanaged as it sometimes was, to achieve that.
I find their self-sacrifice completely humbling and overwhelming. This is why for me one of the most powerful war poems will always be Owen’s ‘Greater Love’. The ambiguity of the final line — ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ — is almost unbearably beautiful: of course, we cannot touch them physically (they are ‘gone’), but neither can we touch, in the sense of attain to, equal, the greatness of their love for us. The view that this is a ‘homoerotic’ poem is strained. The text behind the title could not be clearer: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (St John 15, v. 13), meaning all ‘others’ whom a person loves. They loved those nearest them, but they also loved their ‘own’, the British people, and by implication, even, the other peoples whose freedom they were fighting for.
I have been away from the blog for a few days, but this reminds me of my post on 31 October (‘Complex, yes’) and Clare Hopkins’ fine comment on it. Remembering now the whole story of George Calderon’s military involvement since 4 August 1914, I see it differently; more objectively, I hope. It was an extraordinary, consciously and brilliantly manoeuvred achievement on George’s part to get from rejection by the Inns of Court Regiment on 3 August to participation as a combatant in the hottest spot on the Western Front on 29 October 1914. That alone deserves admiration. Whether he was an asset there or not, one cannot deny that he put himself directly in the firing line.
Equally, we should recognise that on this occasion ‘someone was looking after him’. He could well have been killed when the fighting began in earnest at Ypres on 20 October, but his medical problem whisked him away in time. Similarly, if he had not been wounded by the sniper on 29 October, but had moved on with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he would almost certainly have been killed with the rest of them when their trenches behind Zandvoorde were shelled next day.
Without wishing to preempt anything, I should perhaps also say that the George Calderon who joined another regiment in January 1915 seems almost a different man from the Interpreter of October 1914, and that was partly because of the experience of battle he had gained at Ypres and the experience of recovering from acute stress disorder — a process to which we must now return.
Next entry: ‘He downright cried’
The military situation (1)
In the course of the First Battle of Ypres (19 October – 22 November 1914), the French, Belgian and British armies had fought Falkenhayn’s army to a standstill; but at a terrible cost. Beckett (2013) estimates German losses at a minimum of 134,300, of whom approximately 19,600 were killed. French losses are difficult to quantify for this period, but appear to have been between 50,000 and 85,000. The Belgians lost 18,522 — a third of their army that had escaped Antwerp. BEF casualties were 58,155 including 7960 dead.
One of the reasons for the Germans’ defeat at Ypres was that Falkenhayn had thrown thousands of under-trained reservists and student volunteers against what were veteran regular soldiers. Almost all commentators agree with Sir James Edmonds, the official historian of the Great War, that the BEF was ‘incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British Army that ever went forth to war’. But Ypres was its graveyard. The ‘old’, professional, patrician Army was no more. Followers of this blog may recall that on 27 October the commander of IV Corps, Henry Rawlinson, found himself with no corps to command, since his infantry (7th Division) had lost so many men that it had to be amalgamated with Haig’s I Corps and his cavalry (3rd Division) was transferred to Allenby’s Cavalry Corps. On 1 November 7th Division’s commander, Thompson Capper, actually said there was ‘no division left, so that I’m a curiosity — a divisional commander without a division’. This was the division that contained the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, in which George Calderon had briefly served as a second lieutenant on 29 October.
The Kaiser, who had planned to make a triumphal entry into Ypres on a white horse, was profoundly depressed by the outcome of the battle. Falkenhayn himself concluded that Germany might not have another opportunity to win the war, and recommended a diplomatic solution. But this was politically unacceptable.
Both sides dug in as fast and impregnably as they could. Trenches now stretched 500 miles from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border and the war was evidently entering a different phase. How could trench warfare be won? Practical answers were already exercising generals’ minds on both sides. More lateral thinkers, however, were meditating on other ways of breaking the military stalemate.
Falkenhayn had had to redeploy troops from Ypres to the Eastern Front — that was another reason he had lost the battle. He now proposed closing down the Eastern Front entirely, by coming to a ‘Bismarckian’ accommodation with Russia. The influx to the Western Front of the forces thus freed would, he was convinced, crack the Allied defence. But the Chancellor in 1914, Bethmann Hollweg, would have none of it. Worse, Ludendorff and Hindenburg fervently believed that Germany should, and could, win the war in the East quickly, and only then turn to win it in the West. Against his better judgement, Falkenhayn allowed himself to be drawn into this fantasy.
By contrast, in London on 5 December 1914 the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was writing to the Platonic love of his life, Venetia Stanley, that the ‘volatile mind’ of his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was ‘at present set on Turkey and Bulgaria, and he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles’. This was the most lateral proposal made for breaking the stalemate in which the war was locked. Asquith told Miss Stanley that he was ‘altogether opposed’ to it…
Next entry: The military situation (2)