The Hell where Youth and Laughter Go The Great War

1917 was an awful year.

All the divisions of the world and all its conflicts

seemed to be resolved into one conflict and one division.

The conflict was the war. The division was between those who were truly in it and those who were not.

It was a world war. No continent was spared. Few countries of any stature were able to stand aside.

Japan was in. America was in. Bulgaria was in. Romania was in.

Greece was in. Portugal was in. Bolivia was in.

Russia was going out.

By now, whatever men might wish or plan, whether they believed in it or whether they did not,

one front had inexorably become the centre, the very heart of the war - the Western Front.

470 miles long. The great battles of four years had created on either side of the trench lines

a deep zone of military endeavour,

a hideous, ravaged wilderness.

The zone of the armies.

SHELLS EXPLODE

This zone was a place apart,

a separate region, a landscape of madness.

The scenes which four years of modern war had created within it

could never be imagined by those outside.

Only the artist's eye could fathom what man had inflicted upon himself in this zone.

SHELLS FLY OVERHEAD

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

The separateness was absolute. You could almost draw a line where it began.

For one war artist, Sir William Orpen, just beyond the valley between Amiens and Albert:

Suddenly one felt oneself in another world.

For Wyndham Lewis, it began just past the line of guns:

At this point, civilisation ended.

"From here onwards," said Lewis,

"there was only shell-pitted nothingness,

"an arid and blistering vacuum."

GUNFIRE

The artist filled this vacuum each in his own way

with a frieze of tragic and heroic figures.

The lost and tiny soldiers and their weapons amid the desolate expanse.

Each one differently depicted the terrible footprint of man.

Paul Nash turned his brush and pencil into weapons to assail the cruelty of war.

Other war artists

only SAW an explosion. But the explosion took place inside Nash.

Paul Nash revealed the Earth herself exploded.

And with wonder, at particular times in particular places,

each artist observed the extraordinary beauty of this man-made desert.

-Nash wrote to his wife in March 1917:

-Here in the back garden of the trenches,

it is amazingly beautiful.

The mud is dried to a pinky colour,

and upon the parapet

and through the sandbags, even,

the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze

while dots of bright dandelion, clover, thistles and 20 other plants

flourish luxuriously -

brilliant growth of bright green against the pink earth.

Orpen revisited the year-old battlefields of the Somme.

Now, in the summer of 1917, no words could express the beauty of it.

The dreary, dismal mount was baked white and pure - dazzling white.

White daisies, red poppies and a blue flower, great masses of them, stretched for miles and miles.

The sky a pure, dark blue, and the whole air, up to a height of about 40 feet, thick with butterflies.

Everything shimmered in the heat.

Clothes, guns, all that had been left in confusion when the war passed on had been baked by the sun

into one wonderful combination of colour - white, pale grey and pale gold.

Amid this macabre beauty and unspeakable ugliness,

the ant-like armies in their millions came to terms with the war's afflictions.

On the Western Front, a continuous accompaniment of sound diseased their nerves.

RELENTLESS EXPLOSIONS

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

CONTINUOUS GUNFIRE

After the Germans had stopped shelling a little while, we heard one of their big ones coming over.

Normally you could tell if one was going to land anywhere near, or not.

If it was, the normal procedure was to throw yourself down and avoid the shell fragments.

This one, we knew, was going to drop near. My pal shouted and threw himself down.

I was too damn tired even to fall down.

I stood there. Next I had a terrific pain in the back and the chest,

and I found myself face downwards in the mud.

In this permanent zone of destruction where war seemed to be a fixture from time immemorial

stretching forward to invisible duration, sound was always there,

the smell was always there.

The familiar trench smell of 1915 to '17 haunts my nostrils,

compounded of stagnant mud, latrine buckets,

chloride of lime, unburied or half-buried corpses,

rotting sandbags,

stale human sweat, fumes of cordite or lyddite. Sometimes it was sweetened

by cigarette smoke and the scent of bacon frying over wood fires - broken ammunition boxes.

Sometimes it was made sinister

by the lingering odour of poisoned gas.

Within this unquiet zone,

sharing such compensations as it had, dwelt a population apart -

the armies of Germany, France,

the British Empire and Belgium.

When the infantry looked upwards, admiringly, hopefully or fearfully,

they saw dotted against the clouds

the airmen - counted in thousands now, yet still able to preserve in this vast, anonymous war

individual identities which the muddied infantry might envy.

They fought a war of champions.

The names of the aces rang through every country - Guynemer,

Fonck, Nungesser, Ball,

McCudden, Mannock, Boelcke,

Immelmann, Richthofen.

Looking down from their swaying cockpits,

the fliers saw below them,

as no-one else could see, unfolding mile beyond mile,

the incredible pock-marked devastation of the Western Front,

the world within a world.

Down there on the ground,

men had few intimates.

Beyond the narrow horizon through a periscope or bordered by a trench or the lip of a crater,

there was someone else whom one had learnt to know better, perhaps, than one knew one's own people.

Sometimes as little as 20 yards away, sometimes half a mile,

he was always there, living exactly as one lived oneself - the front line enemy.

I never had any feelings towards any personal enemy.

For me, and also for most of the boys, it was THE enemy.

Whether is was British or French, we didn't mind, and I think that the British thought in the same way.

As soon as we made prisoners, the feeling of enemy was gone.

Then we took care of them. We looked after them.

We asked them if they were thirsty. Most of them were very thirsty,

because warfare makes thirsty.

You are very much excited. You perspire.

You are afraid. Everybody is shivering.

The nerve strain is a terrible one.

But never one forgets

what each man on both sides has to undergo.

The enemy was Jerry

or Old Fritz. Front line soldiers spoke openly of "German comrades".

Even the French had learnt to use the word "Boche" in a half-friendly way.

For Frenchmen, fighting on their own soil and always on the same worn-out, blood-soaked

stretches of their soil, the sense of separateness

-came with a peculiar shock.

-They realised they were becoming strangers in their own land.

The army came to be looked on as an exile from the life of the nation.

The military world had no connection

with the life of the country. Two universes were juxtaposed - the one civilian, the other uniformed -

and they knew nothing of each other.

If you were to ask me who it is we despise and hate the most,

my answer would be, first of all, the war profiteers, businessmen of all kinds.

With them, the professional patriots,

the literary gents who dine each day in pyjamas and red leather slippers off a dish of Boche.

Every army hated "literary gents".

-A German soldier wrote:

-According to the newspapers,

the French were degenerates, the English, cowardly shopkeepers, the Russians, swine. The disparaging

and calumniating of the enemy was so disgusting that I sent a paragraph to an editor. He returned it

with a letter that made me despair. "One had to bear in mind

"public opinions."

And thus was that public opinion bred which the men at the front came, in time, to spit upon.

The jargon of war on the home front was very different from the language of the fighting men.

A gunner received a book of verse. The writer served in his battery.

About your book - I've read it carefully, and candidly I don't think much of it.

The piece about horses isn't bad but the rest, excuse the word, is tripe.

The same old tripe we've read a thousand times. My grief, but we're fed up with war books,

war verse, all the eyewash stuff

that pleases the idiots at home.

What's the good of war books if they fail to give civilians an idea

of what life is like in the firing line? You might have done that much.

From you, at least, I thought we'd get an inkling of the truth. But no.

You rant, rattle, beat your drum

and blow your tuppenny trumpet like the rest. "Battle's glory."

"Honour's utmost task." "Gay, jesting faces among daunted boys."

The same old boy's own paper balderdash.

Hang it, you can't have clean forgotten things you went to bed with, woke with, smelt and felt.

All those long months of boredom streaked with fear. Mud. Cold.

Fatigue. Sweat.

Nerve strain. Sleeplessness.

And men's excreta

viscid in the rain.

And stiff-legged horses lying by the road, their bloated bellies shimmering, green with flies.

Images of war could never fade from the minds of those who knew them

and could scarcely be conceived in the minds of those who didn't.

Arriving home on leave, I went to my aunt's house.

And, er...

I found that people wanted to take me out to dinners

and theatres

and didn't want to know much about what we were doing out in the front.

But I did explain to them that the conditions were really terrible

and that the food also was bad.

But they didn't want to know at all.

When you stepped off the train at Victoria, the first effect was just that you were home for the holidays.

But very soon, that began to wear off.

And at any rate, from 1917 onwards,

one felt that there was something unreal about leave.

I'm bound to say that I got myself into a state of mind

where it was the trenches that was the real world,

and it was London and my family that was unreal.

It was a Frenchman who summed up for all the fighting men

exiled in the zone of the armies.

When we get back and tell our story,

it's we who will be wrong.

Soldiers couldn't communicate the truth about the war because nothing like it had ever happened before.

Never has such vast armies

wielding such an immense apparatus of killing and destruction

battled each other for so long in one place.

Flesh and blood and nerves could only stand so much.

Well, there's a limit to everything.

But what with the mud of the Somme and the mud of Passchendaele,

to see men keep on sinking into the slime, dying in the slime, I think it absolutely finished me off.

Because I knew for three months before I was wounded that I was going to get it.

There was one time when ammunition wagons were coming up.

I'd been in this mud right up to my waist and I thought, "This is it. I'll put my leg under the wagon."

And I got as close to that wagon as possible. I just couldn't do it.

I think I was broken in spirit and mind.

By the end of 1917, every army had shown the effects of this unremitted strain

eating away morale.

Newcomers might still be eager, still imbued with the enthusiasm of earlier years.

They were startled at what they found.

You see, when I joined up, I was dead scared I wouldn't get out to France before it was over.

I thought it would be over before I'd get there. And when I got there,

when I got into the line,

I remember writing back home saying, "But the heart's been blown out of these people."

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

This was now almost entirely a citizen army, a vast force approaching five millions,

nearly two millions of them on the Western Front.

In all the time that this army remained in the field, there were 304,000 trials by court martial.

3,080 death sentences were passed.

346 were carried out.

He stood, tied to a post,

against a wall.

And he was in civilian clothes.

And there was a little white piece of paper pinned over his heart. We had to fire at that.

We did not know what our rifles were loaded with. Some were loaded with ball, others with blank.

We then had the order

to...

fire.

And pull the trigger.

One knew by the recoil if...

it was loaded with ball or not.

Then...

that deserter's name was read out on three successive parades as a warning.

The majority of these executions took place on the Western Front.

More than three quarters were for desertion.

-The next most frequent crime was murder.

-Firing party...

-fire!

-SHOTS RING OUT

Despite depressing circumstances, the discipline of the British soldiers did not break down,

but every last shred of humour and optimism was needed to maintain it.

Yet the Western Front had its compensations. "The war years,"

said one British soldier, "will stand out

"in the memories of many who fought as the happiest period of their lives." He went on:

In spite of differences in rank,

we were comrades, brothers dwelling together in amity.

We were privileged to see in each other that ennobled self which in the commercial struggle of peacetime

is atrophied for lack of expression.

We could note the intense affection of soldiers for certain officers, their absolute trust in them.

We saw the love, passing the love of women, of one pal for his section.

We were privileged, in short, to see

a reign of goodwill among men which the piping times of peace, with all their organised charity,

their free meals and Sunday sermons, have never equalled. Otherwise we could not have stuck it.

The code of front line behaviour became the only one worth having.

Hateful, disgusting, terrifying - the zone of the armies was nevertheless

the only place to be.

For my part, I am more glad of that experience than of anything else I've known.

The ultimate test of optimism, by now, was the front itself.

Was it hopeless, was it insane to expect a decision on this static, immovable battlefield?

The argument had lasted right through the war. It reached the extremes of bitterness in 1917.

On the one hand were those who believed that the Western Front was a hopeless arena. Their spokesman

was Britain's Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

The Allied strategy in France had been a sanguinary mistake

which nearly brought us to irretrievable defeat.

The Allied generals were completely baffled by the decision of the Germans to dig in.

In their hopeless efforts to break through, they could think of nothing better

-than the sacrifice of millions of men.

-By 1917,

Lloyd George's detestation of the Western Front was adamant, and he expressed it freely.

He said that he was "not prepared to be a butcher's boy driving cattle to the slaughter"

and that he would not do it.

To the British generals, the front had a different significance.

Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir William Robertson said:

The decisive front was fixed for us by the deployment of the enemy in France and Belgium.

Britain's allies endured mixed fortunes as 1917 drew to an end.

The October Revolution threw Russia out of the war, robbing the alliance of her limitless manpower.

And the United States of America, after eight months of war, could only place four divisions in France

and only one in the line.

Italy lost over 300,000 men in three weeks at Caporetto.

British and French divisions had to be rushed to her aid. The one satisfactory feature

was the revival of France.

Nursed by its commander in chief,

General Petain, the French army slowly recovered its courage and dash.

The French nation, too, found new spirit - embodied, as so often, in one man.

On November 15th, Monsieur Georges Clemenceau became France's premier.

He was 76 years old, a radical of the sternest breed called the Tiger.

Winston Churchill wrote:

As much as any single human being can ever be a nation, he was France.

When Clemenceau addressed the French Chamber of Deputies,

he told them:

We stand here with but one thought - to pursue the war relentlessly.

No more pacifist campaigns.

No treachery. No semi-treachery.

Only war. Nothing but war.

Clemenceau believed firmly in the Western Front, where the deadlock now seemed complete.

In a sense, the deadlock WAS the war.

The evil of the Western Front was its immobility. The immobility was created by the deadlock.

The deadlock was the even balance of trenches, barbed wire and machine guns against the artillery

which alone could destroy them,

but in doing so turned the ground into a wilderness of craters and made impossible the movement

it was intended to produce.

Now it was November.

Haig planned a final stroke on the front of the British Third Army under General Sir Julian Byng.

Here, opposite Cambrai, the ground was firm.

Grass grew across a no-man's-land which was reasonably level.

No shattering bombardments had torn this up and turned it into a bog.

This was tank country.

November the 19th. General Ellis, commanding the Tank Corps, issued a special order.

Tomorrow the Tank Corps will have the chance it has been waiting for,

to operate on good going in the van of the battle.

I leave the good name of the corps with confidence in your hands. I shall lead the centre division.

They were attacking the Hindenburg line.

There were three lines of trenches, each trench up to 15 feet wide.

In front of the main line lay acre upon acre of dense wire.

Nowhere was it less than 50 yards deep. Here and there it jutted out in salients flanked by machine guns.

Never before had we been faced with such a wilderness of wire.

At 6.20am on November the 20th, with their general

flying his flag at their head

in the tank Hilda, the machines of a new epoch rolled into battle.

476 tanks. Over 50 supply tanks.

32 specially for destroying wire.

Two for bridging. Nine wireless tanks. One for laying cable.

378 fighting tanks.

We got in, shut down our tanks, and away we went.

We had rough compasses in the tanks and we got our course and we set course for the enemy line.

The first thing that happened...

It was dead silent until we got to the enemy wire, which was zero hour for the guns.

That, again, was a first-class show. Crystal Palace had nothing in it.

No answer from the Germans at all.

It was the first time we saw the Hun being blown up all over the place.

The troops were frightfully pleased. No gunfire, so we opened our tanks.

And then we got into this belt of wire. It was quite terrifying.

It was about seven feet high. Very, very thick wire. It was over 120 yards deep in places.

If we'd stopped or got our tracks ripped off, we'd have been for it.

Instead, the tanks made great swathes in the wire. The Jocks, who were with us,

they came through the gaps we'd made.

We all emerged the other side into a deep valley known as the Grand Ravine.

I crossed the first line.

The wire didn't prove to be any obstacle at all. The artillery had done their job very well.

The element of surprise - the heavy shelling, no preliminary bombardment -

had made it almost a cakewalk.

Almost a cakewalk. In four hours, the British Third Army

advanced between three and four miles right through the Hindenburg defences, took over 4,000 prisoners

and over 100 guns.

Their own losses were astonishingly light. It was one of the most remarkable victories of the war.

In November 1917, victory of any kind was badly needed.

The government decided that the time had come to ring the church bells of Britain.

PEALING OF BELLS

It's the first time the peals have been rung since the outbreak of war.

I went up Ludgate Hill

to hear St Paul's carillon. It hasn't been heard

since it celebrated the declaration of peace after the South African War. There was a crowd on the steps.

After the clock struck 12, the big bell known as Great Paul boomed out,

followed by the whole peal of bells.

The people cheered. The bells of the other churches

helped to swell the rings of sound carrying the joyful news.

One of Haig's staff officers wrote on November the 23rd:

All at home seem to have gone crazy

about the last success. It was a very fine effort,

but no greater than other shows. It does not deserve hysterics.

When the really big, decisive victory comes,

it will be time enough to ring church bells and sing the national anthem.

The doubters were right.

On November the 30th the Germans counter-attacked,

taking most of the British troops by surprise.

In the fight which followed, they won back

almost all the ground that they had lost.

When the battle died down, losses on both sides were roughly equal.

It was a sad end for the British army, which had put forth such tremendous efforts during the year.

The iron of disappointment entered deep into men's souls.

A British diplomat wrote to Haig:

Even now, this war could have

a glorious ending for us, but it won't.

Christmas came, and an officer at Haig's headquarters wrote

-in his diary:

-The fourth Christmas at war. Though the outlook is black,

yet still I think it will be the last war Christmas.

How different each Christmas has been.

We cannot fail to win.

Each year inevitably shows success more certain.

But for the next few months, the prospect is the most gloomy

since 1914.

1917 expired, having brought nothing but frustration to the Allied cause.

The Western Front remained,

baffling, bloody,

ruinous, and still the very heart of the war.

All that men could look forward to was Clemenceau's promise.

Only war.

Nothing but war.

Subtitles by Subtext Limited for BBC Broadcast - 2003

e-mail us at [email protected]