In the trenches, the Christmas season was anything but merry. "A high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields," remembered the war correspondent Philip Gibbs, "but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through the mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets.... They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water.... Whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze."
At a point where British and German lines were so close that each side could hear the squelching of the other's boots, Gibbs reported a conversation in shouts over the parapets:
"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier....
"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.
"So?...You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it."
As Christmas Day approached, all British units were given strict orders that there be no repeat of the spontaneous fraternization of the previous year. But even without a truce, something else had already started to happen, without reference to any holiday. At a number of places on the front where Allied and German trenches had been fixed in place for so long, there evolved a tacit system of "live and let live." If, for example, you fired trench mortars at the Germans while they were having lunch or dinner, they would do the same to you, so sometimes firing stopped at mealtimes. At a safe moment like this, a soldier might even signal the other side—perhaps by climbing briefly above the parapet and pointing to his shoulder, where an officer's insignia would be—when a commander was about to visit. Then troops on both sides would begin a barrage of rifle and machine-gun fire, and British and French infantrymen quickly learned that if they aimed too high, the Germans would do the same. A similar informal understanding sometimes also covered no man's land, where soldiers were ordered to go on dreaded night patrols to repair barbed-wire barricades and reconnoiter enemy defenses. One young British officer typically described leading several men on such a mission when "we suddenly confronted, round some mound or excavation, a German patrol ... we were perhaps twenty yards from each other, fully visible. I waved a weary hand, as if to say: what is the use of killing each other? The German officer seemed to understand, and both parties turned and made their way back to their own trenches. Reprehensible conduct, no doubt."
In some places, the front-line trenches were far apart and the cratered expanse of no man's land might be several hundred yards wide. This allowed the rise of a curious and persistent legend. No man's land was not empty, some soldiers claimed, but populated by deserters who found shelter in shell holes and caves as well as abandoned trenches and dugouts. After every skirmish, when darkness fell, they would come out to rob the dead and dying of their food and water. As time passed these spectral survivors grew long beards and their uniforms turned to rags—until they took new ones from the dead. They were the source, it was said, of mysterious noises heard at night. And this roving community in no man's land was international, men were convinced, with deserters from both sides. The generals had forbidden fraternization, but they couldn't prevent it from happening in myth.
No war in history had seen so many troops locked in stalemate for so long. The year 1915 had begun with the Germans occupying some 19,500 square miles of French and Belgian territory. At its end, Allied troops had recaptured exactly eight of those square miles, the British alone suffering more than a quarter-million casualties in the process. Still an endless stream of wounded flowed home, and still the newspapers were filled with lists of those killed or missing.
For Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, messages of sympathy arrived from all over the world, from Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and other friends at home and abroad. "They tell me John is reported missing," said a letter from a fellow Irish Guards officer wounded in the same battle, "but I feel sure that it will all come right as ... I myself was officially reported missing." Others also tried to be optimistic: "We can but trust he is a prisoner," wrote the Prince of Wales.
The distraught Kipling doggedly questioned a succession of Irish Guardsmen, but in vain. The War Office had listed John as "wounded and missing"; Kipling was enraged when a newspaper referred to him as "missing, believed killed." He and Carrie clung to the hope that John might be alive, in a hospital or prison camp in Germany. With survivors of the battle eager to comfort the stricken parents with any possible scrap of news or rumor, conflicting information began to pile up: that John had a leg wound, that he had been shot in the neck, that he had been seen alive after the time he was reported missing. Even though he despised governments that had remained neutral in what he saw as a titanic struggle between good and evil, Kipling turned to the American ambassador, asking that a description of his son be sent to the U.S. embassy in Berlin: "He is dark with strongly marked eyebrows, small moustache, thick brown hair (straight), dark brown eyes with long lashes. Height about 5.7½.... He is short-sighted and is most probably wearing gold spectacles."
Now it was Violet Cecil's turn to offer sympathy and compassion to her friends, as they had to her. Milner, ever the realist, wrote in his diary, "We fear he is killed." Carrie Kipling had rushed to see Violet the day after John was reported missing, and sometimes wrote to her twice a day. Violet herself interviewed one wounded Irish Guards officer in the hospital to see if she could find out anything, and, in hopes that another neutral power could help, sent a letter to the Crown Princess of Sweden. "No news," Carrie wrote to her, "—a great darkness seems to be settling down on it all. But who should know better than you."
Kipling wrote on, but on occasion now his martial voice was muted, and it almost seemed a different person speaking:
"Have you news of my boy Jack?"
Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Has any one else had word of him?"
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide...
IV. 1916
13. WE REGRET NOTHING
BY THE BEGINNING of 1916, in response to recruiting drives, posters ("Don't Lag! Follow Your Flag!"), and music hall songs ("Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go"), an impressive two and a half million men had enlisted. One historian has called Britain's volunteer army "the greatest expression of enthusiasm for war in all history." That enthusiasm, however, was not evenly shared. Although members of the working class never opposed the war on anything like the scale Keir Hardie dreamed of, they showed less zeal than the better-off, volunteering for the army at a noticeably lower rate than professionals and white-collar workers.
War-minded Britons who worried about lingering pockets of working-class internationalism were heartened, however, in March 1916, by the birth of a new organization, which became known as the British Workers' League. The group, made up mostly of trade union officials, issued statements that sounded vaguely socialist, calling for better wages and pensions as well as for "national control of vital industries." But it was also vigorously prowar. "All-British from the core," it proclaimed itself, vowing victory over "Germans and Austrians who are now doing their best to destroy us." Unusual then, this combination—support for social welfare measures and strident nationalism—would become far more familiar as fascism rose in the 1920s and '30s. As in the fascist labor movements to come, several of the League's leaders were distinctly thuggish. Followers of one of them, Joseph Havelock Wilson of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union, set fire to the office of an antiwar rival, with the man still inside. When he fled the fire, they tried to throw him back in.
It was clearly a great boon to the government to have an organization of "workers" attacking the Independent Labour Party and other antiwar groups, which officials of the new League quickly did, at public meetings and in its vociferously chauvinist weekly, the British Citizen an
d Empire Worker. For every demand the League made for better pay or public ownership of key industries, there were louder attacks on "shirkers" from the war effort and on traitors to the empire. The prowar press was delighted; the Times described one League demonstration as "beyond all question ... the authentic voice of the working classes." Less than a year after its founding, this surprisingly well-financed organization would claim 74 branches around the country, staging 100 patriotic mass meetings a week.
There were, of course, millions of working-class Britons who were genuinely prowar. The League, however, was the brainchild of someone who was anything but proletarian: Alfred, Lord Milner. "I am trying, very hard, but quietly," he wrote to a friend just before the League went public, "to further a purely working-class movement which I hope will knock out the ILP ... among Trade Unionists [and] which will make Imperial Unity and Citizens' Service [i.e., conscription] planks in its programme." The enthusiasm of the Times for this "authentic voice of the working classes" was also Milner's doing, for the paper's editor was a close friend and disciple, a former member of the South African Kindergarten.
"It would be difficult to imagine," a biographer comments, "anyone less suitable than Milner to inspire a working class movement." But the League was his creation and his alone: he had found the perfect person to run it, Victor Fisher, an experienced socialist journalist, and then quietly lined up the necessary funders: Waldorf Astor, MP, a young member of a famously non-working-class family, and later the shipping magnate Sir James Knott. The cash was put into a special account at the London Joint Stock Bank, from which Milner personally doled it out to Fisher, checking his expense reports. "Shall we call the a/c the 'Imperial Fund'?" Astor asked. Milner replied: "It would not be necessary or perhaps desirable, to give it any name.... I am a Director of that Bank, so no questions would be asked, and nobody need know anything about it except ourselves."
Fisher himself received a full-time salary plus £1,000 a year for expenses, with a remarkable guarantee that his salary would be paid for three years even if the League ceased operations. Milner met with most of the speakers before the League's first big public meeting, but after that he kept a low profile, although he saw Fisher in private almost every week. He did not mind working with trade unionists, for he had always been open to what some Britons called "gas and water socialism." Public health? Better schools? Public ownership of electric power? No problem: such things were entirely tolerable if they made the economy more efficient and the working class more enthusiastic for the empire—and the war.
The month the new League was founded, conscription finally began. The mass-production slaughter on the fields of France and Flanders required it, to feed the army's relentless appetite for human bodies. A military draft was a radical change for Britain, and because even some prowar MPs were uncomfortable with it and needed persuading, the new law provided a surprisingly broad exemption for conscientious objectors, or COs, as they came to be called. Special tribunals were set up around the country, and if one of these boards agreed that a man had a principled objection to bearing arms, whether religious or secular, he could do alternative service—either in a Non-Combatant Corps within the army or in supervised work gangs doing farm labor, forestry, and other manual jobs that kept the wartime economy going at home. Those exempt from the draft included some skilled workers doing "work of national importance" in strategic industries—and all Irishmen. The last thing the government wanted was anything that might provoke a new nationalist uprising on that highly combustible island.
New conscripts filled training camps in Britain, most of them eventually destined for Haig's forces in France and Belgium. His subordinates at headquarters "all seem to expect success as the result of my arrival," the general wrote to his wife, "and somehow give me the idea that they think I am 'meant to win' by some Superior Power." Strait-laced, humorless, intolerant of off-color jokes, gambling, and ribald songs, Haig was convinced that he had been led to the Western Front by God's hand. He urged a visiting party of clergymen to "preach ... about the objects of Great Britain in carrying on this war. We have no selfish motive but are fighting for the good of humanity."
"We lament too much over death," Haig approvingly quoted his own chosen army pastor, Reverend George Duncan of the Church of Scotland, whose services he attended. "We should regard it as a change to another room." Duncan's views fitted, chillingly, with the general's own thinking. "The nation must be taught to bear losses," Haig wrote, "...[and] to see heavy casualty lists for what may appear to the uninitiated to be insufficient object[s].... Three years of war and the loss of one-tenth of the manhood of the nation is not too great a price to pay in so great a cause."
For manhood of prime military age, the price would prove far higher.
As the year began, Haig was as relentlessly optimistic as his predecessor, supremely confident that his tenacity and skill could succeed—and swiftly—where French had failed. "The Germans might bargain for peace before the coming winter," he told the King. Shortly after taking command, Haig urged renewed cavalry recruiting and ordered a fresh round of inspections of his five cavalry divisions, to put spine into "some officers who think that Cavalry are no longer required!!!" In a letter to the chief of the Imperial General Staff, he spoke of being prepared for a version of Murat's famous cavalry pursuit of the retreating Prussians at the Battle of Jena—in 1806. Haig's obsession was shared by British painters and illustrators, who filled canvases and magazine pages with heroic cavalry charges that bore little resemblance to reality. "Straight at the Guns the Lancers Rode," read a typical caption in the Illustrated London News.
At the front, most soldiers were focused on less glorious matters, such as the slimy mass of frogs and slugs that infested the trenches as the weather grew warmer and wetter with the spring thaw. One 36-year-old infantry officer wrote to a friend that "lately a certain number of cats have taken to nesting in the corpses, but I think the rats will get them in the end; though like all wars it will doubtless be a war of attrition." This observation came from Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister and a widely admired lawyer and wit. Of trench life in winter, he wrote to his wife, he was trying to "take the same sort of interest ... as an ill-tempered tourist may take in an uncomfortable hotel."
An unending stream of VIP visitors enjoyed far better lodgings when they called on Haig at his headquarters, which were spread among a military academy, a hotel, and other buildings in the medieval French town of Montreuil; the commander himself lived in a small château nearby. "Montreuil was a place to bring tears to the eyes of an artist.... The tiny walled town on a hill had that poignant fulness of loveliness, making the sense ache at it, like still summer evenings in England," wrote the author C. E. Montague, whose army job was to take journalists on tours of the front. "It was a storied antique, unscathed ... weathered mellow with centuries of sunshine and tranquillity.... Walking among its walled gardens, where roses hung over the walls ... you were not merely out of the war; you were out of all war."
For Haig's entourage, their uniforms marked by staff officers' distinctive red lapel tabs and hatbands as well as armbands in the red and blue of General Headquarters colors, there was a tennis court to play on and narrow cobblestone streets to stroll down. At the officers' club, a band played ragtime while customers were served by attractive young waitresses from the new Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in khaki stockings and skirts (no more than 12 inches off the ground, regulations required). The bows in their hair were in headquarters red and blue.
A man of strict routines, Haig stepped out of his bedroom at exactly 8:25 every morning, checked the barometer, went for the briefest of walks in the château's garden, and sat down for breakfast at 8:30. After a morning in his office, unless he was visiting one of his subordinate commanders, he would take a two-hour afternoon ride on horseback, accompanied by several aides-de-camp and an escort of lancers with fluttering pennons. Having returned to his desk, he stopped for dinner promptly at 8:00 P.M. and then wo
rked again or talked with visitors until 10:45. When he inspected troops, he was particularly attentive to their appearance and discipline, noting disapprovingly in his diary one battalion's "slackness ... in the matter of saluting."*
Haig and his staff ate well, enjoying the steady supply of foie gras, fresh fish, and joints of lamb that his friend Leopold de Rothschild sent to Montreuil. "All the troops here are very fit and cheery," the general wrote to Rothschild. "Indeed ... it is the troops in the field who write home to cheer their friends and not the other way!" The censors who read the soldiers' outbound mail collected only the most upbeat excerpts to show Haig. There can be no question, though, that in this honeymoon period soldiers did indeed project onto Haig their hopes for an early victory and a return home.
Haig's very uncommunicativeness allowed civilians and soldiers alike to read into the man the qualities they wanted to see. "Haig was a silent man.... You had to learn a sort of verbal shorthand made up of a series of grunts and gestures," wrote his aide-de-camp Desmond Morton. Of one such instance Morton recalled, "The briefing lasted about twenty minutes and consisted of Haig with a pointer in front of a large-scale map of the battle pointing at various spots and making grunting noises with a few words interspersed. 'Never believed ... petrol ... bridge gone ... where cavalry?' and so on. Fortunately I knew the cipher by this time. I am sure Haig felt he had given me a long and lucid lecture on the whole affair."
In the subordinates Haig chose, loyalty and length of service were what counted, not initiative. "If by any chance failures are sent home," an officer at the Montreuil headquarters wrote to his wife, "they are put in charge of new divisions and re-appear in a few months to do further damage." As he had all his life, Haig vigorously defended the seniority principle, demanding that if someone was recommended for promotion, a list of any officers senior to the man had to be forwarded with the recommendation. Haig had risen through the military bureaucracy by attracting not those with talent or new ideas but rather those who would not outshine him. There was no shortage of mediocrity in the British army of this era, but he was unusual in openly endorsing the quality. Years before, when his sister wrote to him doubting that a certain officer joining his staff was "clever enough for the job," Haig replied: "The so called sharp people very often disappoint us or cheat or have some other drawback such as being disagreeable, bad-tempered, etc. All I require is people of average intelligence who are keen to do their work properly."