The Germans were forced to dig in. It was the beginning of trench
warfare. Then the line hardly altered for four years more, in spite of
endless battles and unceasing death.
The British Regulars—that “contemptible little army” as the Kaiser
called it before its rifle fire mowed down his men—were spent and
done after the first and second Battles of Ypres, where they barred
the way to Calais with a thin line standing among their dead. The
Territorials—volunteers before the war—arrived, as steady as old
soldiers. It was due to them that the Regulars had been able to get to
France, leaving them for home defence. Then the new armies came into
the field—“the Kitchener boys”—the First Hundred Thousand. They were
those young men who had stormed the recruiting offices at the first
call: from the Universities, public schools, city offices, village
shops, and fields. They had been together in the ranks, learning each
other’s language, bullied by sergeant-majors, broken in by discipline,
taught to forget the decencies of civilisation as they had known it in
their homes, the little comforts of their former state, individual
liberty. Already they had left their old civilian life far behind. Yet
they came out to France and Flanders like schoolboys in keenness and
enthusiasm. They wanted to get into the “real thing” after all that
gruelling training. They got into it quickly enough, up beyond Ypres
at Hooge and St. Julien, or further south at “Plug Street” and Hill
60. They sat in water-logged trenches, with bits of dead bodies in the
mud about them, under frightful shell-fire twenty times greater than
the answer of their own guns because they were weak in artillery and
short of shells. (The workers at home had not got into their stride in
pouring out the engines of destruction.) They had no dug-outs worth
the name. Only the Germans knew how to build them then, as they knew
most else of war, as masters of technique, overwhelmingly superior
in material, and in organisation. The British were in the low ground
everywhere, with the Germans on the high ground, so that they could not
march or move by daylight, or light a fire, or cross a road, without
being signalled to watchful eyes and shelled without mercy. They were
lousy in every seam of their shirts. There was no chance of cleanliness
unless they were far behind the lines. Young gentlemen of England—and
of Scotland, Ireland and Wales—found themselves like cave men: eating,
sleeping, living in filth and the stench of corruption, under winged
death searching for their bodies. They saw their comrades blown to
bits beside them; counted their own chances, coldly, made it one in
four, with luck. They were afraid of fear. To lose control—that would
be worst of all. To show funk before the other men, to feel themselves
ducking, shrinking, weakening, under those cursed shrieking shells,
to surrender will power—that would be fatal. Some did, gibbering with
shell-shock, or shot as cowards; but few. The marvel was that youth
could stand so much, and still make jokes, laughing at the frightful
irony between their old life and this new one, between the old lessons
learnt by nice little gentlemen in nurseries, and this bloody business
and primaeval stuff of killing and being killed!
It was truly a world war. Italy had come in. British troops were
fighting in Africa and Asia. The Japanese Navy was in alliance with the
British Fleet. Both France and England brought over coloured troops.
Indian Princes poured out their wealth and offered their man power.
Sikhs and Pathans rode through French fields. Gurkhas cut off the ears
of German peasants after cutting their throats with curved knives.
Indian cavalry, dismounted, were sent into the wet trenches of French
Flanders and died of cold if they did not die of wounds. Seneghalese
negroes drove French lorries, were massacred as infantry. Moroccans
were billeted in French villages and Arab chiefs rode through Dunkirk.
Chinese coolies unloaded British shells and cut down French forests for
British trench props. And the coloured races of the world were shown
the picture of the white races destroying each other for some reason
which was never clear to them....