Fifty years too late (1964)

From the August 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has taken the world a long time to get back its breath after the shock of the First World War. Now it is time for a reassessment. Not surprisingly, this is proving to be a painful business.

The war is under severe criticism: the defenders of that episode in human history are finding it difficult to hold their lines and in many cases are in full retreat. Books, articles, photographs—even a West End musical have been devoted to a merciless exposure of the war. The generals are now regarded as cold blooded fools, the politicians as impotent puppets. Only the Poor Bloody Infantryman comes out of it well, slogging up to the Front, grovelling in the slime, resignedly going over the top whenever he was ordered to.

A new generation of exceedingly articulate historians have analysed the war. Alan Clark has written bitterly on the “experiments” of 1915, Brian Gardner has exposed the 1916 Battle of the Somme, Leon Wolff that of Passehendaele in1917. Alan Moorehead has told the story of the massive blunder of Galllipoli. And so on. These writings have taken full profit of the historian’s natural advantage of hindsight—the advantage which men like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who had actual experience of the war, did not have. Although they eventually came to doubt the motives of the war, Sassoon and Graves were at first aware only of the confusion of it all. They could not know of the more horrible mistakes, of the conceited indifference of the generals. Theirs were snap judgments, put down in white heat.

It is different now. Almost everyone seems to agree that the war was a mistake just like an accountant adding up his books wrong or a mechanic leaving a nut loose. Good—but only as far as it goes. It was, after all, a “mistake” which cost ten million lives. At the time, the war was generally accepted as a good idea. And it is a “mistake” which the world can make again, at any time, because the elements for it are still there.

The condemnation of the Great War fits in with the ever popular theory about the Bad Old Days. But this does not alter the fact that the case against the war, on all scores, is overwhelming. It is pitifully easy to show up the leaders for what they were; Robert Blake, in his edition of the private papers of Sir Douglas Haig, avoids criticising the British commander but in truth Haig’s own words are enough. Many of the generals were hopelessly wrong in their estimations of military prospects which was, after all, their job. Haig, at the beginning of the war, considered the machine gun a much overrated weapon and thought that it would be impossible to use gas.

Sir John French, who was at the time the commander of the British troops, sited his headquarters for the disastrous battle of Loos at a place which had no telephone communication with Haig, whose First Army was to fight the battle. The French General Nivelle sent his men to attack on the Aisne in 1917 although he knew that his plans had fallen into German hands. The French soldiers were massacred: 180,000 of them were lost. Yet General Sir Henry Wilson, who was supposed to be the contact man between the British and the French forces, wrote to Haig, “I don’t think, luckily, that the French losses are very heavy.”

Wilson was only one of the generals who did not seem to know what was happening to the men under their command. However badly his armies were mauled, Haig never lost his confidence. The day before twenty thousand British soldiers were killed on the Somme he wrote: “The weather report is favourable for tomorrow. With God's help. I feel hopeful.” The battle of Arras, in April, 1917, cost 160,000 casualties for an advance of seven thousand yards. Haig's estimate of the losses was sixteen thousand—one-tenth of the actual total—and, of course, he had planned for a much greater advance. In March, 1918, just before the German armies smashed through his lines, he told his Army commanders that he was “ . . .  only afraid that the enemy would find our front so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his army to the attack with the almost certainty of losing very heavily.” 

Haig's Chief of Staff. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, did not visit the Passchendaele battlefield until the fighting was all over. When he did go there he was appalled by the impossible conditions in which the soldiers had fought. He broke down and went: “’Good God. did we really send men to fight in that?”

Perhaps the leaders suffered from a lack of imagination. Most of the generals were firm Westerners: they believed that the only proper place for the war to be fought was in France and Flanders, and they scorned any suggestions of bypassing movements like Gallipoli. Most of these officers started the war as ardent cavalrymen, dreaming of sleek horses prancing across the battlefields under vivid lance pennants. The mud strangled those romantic visions, as surely as it popularised the opposite theory of attrition.

In its baldest terms, this theory was that a general committed his troops to a battle which had virtually no chance of significant success — no chance of bursting through the opposing trenches into the open country beyond. The most that such attacks could achieve was a slogging, bloody advance of a few miles. At the end of the battle the general got his Staff to add up his casualties and those of the other side. If his were less than theirs (and Haig's Staff usually took good care that that was how the figures came out) he had won. Simple. Even for the millions who were attrited.

The result of this theory was that the soldiers were continually being asked to do the impossible and were being blamed as cowards and slackers when they faded to overcome the combined obstacles of trench ailments, shellfire, bottomless mud, barbed wire and machine guns. On July 1st, 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, one of the Corps under Haig's command the Eighth lost thirteen thousand men. Haig's comment on this day's work; was that he was “. . . inclined to believe . . . that few of the 8th Corps left their trenches.”

It is fashionable now for the critics to point a horrified finger at the attrition policy. There is no doubt that the commanders did not seem able to think up any other way of getting their men killed yet the policy had succeeded convincingly in the American Civil War. Were the general really to blame for apparently applying what was then up to date military theory?

Attrition is, in fact, one of war's logical conclusions. The theory sounds too callous to be true but has anyone ever heard of a humane war? Did ever a general plan a battle in which nobody was going to get killed? It was not the commanders, but those people who supported the war and the social conditions which nurture war, yet who objected to the long casualty lists, who were illogical. And in those people we can include most of the young historians who are now so bitterly critical of the war’s conduct.

What, after all. did the world expect? About a year before he was killed, Wilfred Owen composed a moving sonnet which opened with the words: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? ” By the time he wrote that Owen, and many others, were in despair at the endless slaughter. Yet when the war broke out the working class, hysterically patriotic, were not expecting to die like cattle: they looked forward only to swift, glorious victory and a hero’s return.

This was true of both sides. The cheering crowds in London were matched by those in Berlin. This was how Walter Limmer, a law student from Leipzig, who died of wounds in September, 1914, described his regiment's departure for the Front:

   Our march to the station was a gripping and uplifting experience! . . . Such enthusiasm! — the whole battalion with helmets and tunics decked with flowers — handkerchiefs waving untiringly and cheers on every side. . .

It is a bitter fact that the workers eagerly took in the propaganda which was fed to them. The British government were surprised by the response to their appeal for volunteers, which kept up until the losses in the battles of attrition brought conscription on to the scene.

Not all the “volunteers” joined up entirely of their own free will: many of them were subject to varying types and degrees of force. There was the moral force of the girls with the white feathers. There was the sort of persuasion which Siegfried Sassoon mentions in his poem Memorial Tablet: “Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight (Under Lord Derby’s Scheme).” And there was the direct economic pressure from the firms who suddenly declared that they would no longer take on any fit men of military age. (The London County Council, when their tramway men went on strike in 1915, said that they would not take back any strikers who were eligible for military service.)

But even taking all this into account, there can be no question about the workers’ support of the war and of their eagerness to get into uniform. Whatever they saw and experienced at the Front, they kept coming back for more. They never gave up. The French, it is true, were mutinous for a time after Nivelle’s catastrophic offensive in 1917. But they were soon settled and the war ground on. The Germans, of course, suffered terribly but there was still enough fight left in them in 1918 for their great attack in March of that year. All that happened was that the mud got deeper and bloodier and more repulsive as the corpses rotted down into it. Visions of glory gave way to blank despair: most people thought the war would never end.

 

Yet even that did not shake the basic support for the war. It is all very well for confident journalists now to expose the terrible blunders that were made. At the time such exposure would have been generally regarded as acts of gross, unpatriotic indecency. So the journalists held their tongues. In his life of Lloyd George, Tempestuous Journey, Frank Owen tells of the Prime Minister crying:

   If people really knew, the war would he stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t — and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. The thing is horrible, and beyond human nature to bear, and I feel I can’t go on any longer with the bloody business.

Those words sound very heartfelt and sincere but they need not be taken too seriously. It was, after all, Lloyd George’s government who did their best to suppress anyone who tried to tell the truth about the war, even if in this they played up to the mob ignorance of hooligan patriots.

Those were dark days for the world, with only a gallant few holding out. In .September, 1914, the Socialist Party of Great Britain immediately made its opposition to the war plain: " . . . no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working class blood . . .” From that moment we kept up a barrage of opposition. Our speakers were physically attacked and we were forced to discontinue our meetings. Said the Socialist Standard of December, 1914: 

   Owing to various circumstances, including the peculiarly British sense of fair play of our opponents, the Party's Lecture list is considerably curtailed this month.

The next issue advertised no meetings at all, only a defiant attack on

   . . .  the rampant jingo hooligans of the streets, and . . . the “patriotic" fury of certain parasites “dressed in a little brief authority ”.

Our headquarters were raided by the police and almost every issue of the Socialist Standard carried matter which, under the Wartime Regulations, was illegal. Our “crime” was that we were saying then what most people, in part, are thinking now. Here, for example, is an extract from the issue of May, 1915 before the big battles had given second thoughts to some of those who had once been so enthusiastic about the godlike omnipotence of their leaders:

  The men in the trenches are being butchered. It is necessary to hide from them certain contributing factors. It is necessary to hide from them the fact that military experts, whose business it was to understand war, failed utterly to grasp the power, scope and requirements of the awful instruments of slaughter placed in their hands.

The members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were not thanked, during those terrible years, for their stand. But they did not want to be; for them, the facts were enough. Time has shown how correct they were. The Europe which was spawned by the 1919 Conference was ready to father the Second World War. Until recently the conduct of the last war was thought to be above the sort of criticisms which have been levelled at 1914/18. But now, as time allows a better perspective and as the facts come out, opinions are changing. The raid on Dresden has become notorious as an example of shameless mass murder, as are the two atomised Japanese cities. The Dieppe landing has been exposed as a pointless flourish, partly undertaken to occupy troops who were bored with camp life in England. Perhaps the long bomber offensive will one day be seen as the Passchendaele of 1939/45 a drawn out campaign of attrition, in which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides, with little real effect on the course of the war. The late Lord Alanbrooke has put on record the doubts about Churchill's infallibility. And there are now the same hungry questions over the war's conclusions —over the division of Germany and of Berlin, for example as there were about the conditions imposed in 1919 at Versailles.

Perhaps in 1989 there will be smug journalists to point out the mistakes of the Second World War. But can we afford always to wait fifty years to agree that war is an obscene waste of human lives and resources? Capitalism, with its inevitable competition of economic interests, causes modern war. From that flows all the rest the ghastly weapons, the shattered lives, the terror, the confusion, the mistakes. To bemoan the natural results of war without attacking the cause of it is to start at the wrong end of the problem.

The Great War happened a long time ago and it is safe, now, for the truth to filter out. The blinds can be lifted, now that there are only a few people to remember it all—a few old men who still wheeze from the gas, a few white haired women with an aching grief for someone who went out and was left in the mud. Nothing now can bring back the dead, nor put together the splintered limbs, nor erase the intolerable anguish of those four years. The strenuous apologists of capitalism are congratulating themselves on having just woken up to the fact that the First World War was a stupid, pointless bloodbath.

But they are too late.

Fifty years, and ten million lives, and an untold burden of human suffering, too late.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Lloyd George on his "War to End War" (1987)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “The whole surface of the ground consisted of nothing but a series of overlapping shell craters, half full of yellow, slimy water. Through falling into these ponds hundreds upon hundreds of unwounded men lost their lives by drowning. 

"Hundreds of thousands of British troops fought through the slough . . .  slept in mud-holes. When they squelched along, they were shot down into the slush; if wounded they were drowned in the slime; but the survivors still crept and dragged onward for 4 months, with their rifles choked with Flemish ooze . . . A tragedy of heroic endurance enacted in mud, and the British Press rang with praises of . . . the Commander-in-Chief!" 

A "highly placed officer from H.Q." on his first visit to the battle front burst into tears and cried; "Good God. did we really send men to fight in that?" — Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 2208-11.

[From an article "What newspapers did not tell", Socialist Standard. January 1937.]

What Newspapers Did Not Tell (1937)

From the January 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

And what French Soldiers Thought of War

In the French Army in 1917 “Camps were placarded with notices declaring the intention of the soldiers to refuse to go back again to the trenches. . . .  A battalion ordered to the front refused. . . . Soldiers coming home on leave sang the Internationale and demanded peace. Mutinies occurred in 16 different Army Corps, the mutineers alleging that they had been sacrificed by treacherous or inefficient Generals. A force of 15,000 Russians which had been sent to France, openly revolted and had to be bombarded by artillery fire into surrender. A number of young infantrymen marched through the streets 'baa-ing’ like sheep, to indicate that they were being driven like lambs to the slaughter. The ominous symptoms which preceded the Russian Revolution, and later on the German, appeared in the French Army in 1917.”—Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 2132.

Where the Generals Sent Them Last Time

“The whole surface of the ground consisted of nothing but a series of overlapping shell craters, half full of yellow, slimy water. Through falling into these ponds hundreds upon hundreds of unwounded men lost their lives by drowning.

“Hundreds of thousands of British troops fought through the slough . . . slept in mud-holes. When they squelched along, they were shot down into the slush; if wounded they were drowned in the slime; but the survivors still crept and dragged onward for 4 months, with their rifles choked with Flemish ooze. . . . A tragedy of heroic endurance enacted in mud, and the British Press rang with praises of . . . the Commander-in-Chief!”

A “highly placed officer from H.Q.” on his first visit to the battle front burst into tears and cried: “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?”—Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp. 2208-11.

"The Glories of War" by a soldier in the trenches. (1917)

From the April 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are indebted to the Editors of "The Ploughshare" for permission to reprint the following sketches, which appeared in the March issue of the Quaker Magazine of Social Reconstruction.— Ed. Com. Socialist Standard.

We guarantee the genuineness of the two sketches which follow. They are written by. a soldier known to us, one who expresses himself as grateful for the work we are doing. Shame on us to accept thanks for this when so much more could be done!

I. GOING INTO ACTION.

The glories of war! How this great illusion has been kept up in former days! What volumes of romance have been written about it! But now war is stripped of all its glory and romance; it stands bare and hideous in the sight of thinking men, and to the soldiers it is an indescribable horror, breaking the mind and body and eating into the soul.

“Going into action" has always been a favourite theme with romantic writers; it lends itself to vivid word-painting about courage, determination, and sacrifice. Yet going into action to-day spells terror and despair to the men engaged. They know that in the awfulness of modern warfare few survive. Let me, therefore, give a brief description of an engagement as it occurs at the Front to-day.

The regiment has been at rest in billets a few miles behind the firing lines. Here we clean up, recoup, and receive fresh drafts to replace former casualties. A fairly easy time is passed until one morning the Colonel announces on parade that we are going up to the trenches again that night. Now all is activity and excitement; rifles are inspected and ammunition served out. New gas helmets replace the old ones, and “tear-shell" goggles are distributed; some of the men receive trench dubs— “daggers" ; the bombers have the latest instructions read to them. We fill our water-bottles and get the iron rations of bully beef and “dog-biscuits.”

As the day wears on, some of the men become reserved and quiet. The more thoughtful begin to ponder on what is in store for them. Some already feel they are beneath the ground. Poor wretches! perhaps the gods are kind in not giving us a glimpse of the future! But all contemplation soon ceases, for presently the bugles sound the “fall in.” We hastily put on our full equipment, line up in the ranks, and await the Colonel's instructions.

Along he comes, attended by the adjutant and officers. He looks pale and anxious. “Men," he says, “we are going up to the trenches now. I hope you will all give a good account of yourselves, and may God have us in his care.“ The band plays “Eternal Father, strong to save," and as we sing it some cry like children. Tears are in the eyes of all. We think of our dear ones at home, and many a silent prayer is offered up. Some ask themselves in thought: “Is there really a good God to allow this awful suffering and carnage?" The chaplain reads a prayer which seems like the burial service. Then the bugles sound again, hoarse orders are shouted, and away we march as night is quickly falling.

On, on we tramp, staggering beneath the heavy load of equipment, slipping in mud and slush, stumbling in holes. “How much farther is it, chum ? ” I ask the man next to me. He cannot reply, he is crying bitterly. Now we approach the danger zone. The artillery is blazing away and the noise makes talking impossible. We break step, put out our fags, and begin to march in “extended order.” Suddenly there is a roar and a crash—a shell has fallen just behind us! Happily no one is hurt. Then I see a man in front of me fall, caught by a spent bullet. He shrieks in agony, and the stretcher bearers come to his rescue.

Now we march along in silence, absolute silence, dumb men driven to the slaughter. We are nearing the communication trench. The sky is lit up with the flashes of thousands of guns, and the star shells shed a lurid glow over the field of battle. Shells are bursting near us, for the enemy is shelling the roads. Several men fall, hit by shrapnel. We quicken our pace to get the cover of the trenches. The wounded are being brought from a field dressing station and quickly put in Red Cross vans. As the stretchers pass us, the poor wretches groan in agony.

We are now in the assembly trench; it is knee-deep in mud ; we slip and stumble about, advancing in single file towards the front. My company is to be stationed in a rear trench, but the others advance to the front. We are allotted our positions by the Captain, and we stand there all night asking : “Will the dawn never come ? "

All next day we stand there; some have gone into dug-outs to try to get a few hours sleep, but this is almost impossible, for the earth shakes from the vibrations of the artillery. The lice crawl all over the body, driving one nearly frantic, and the rats are in swarms and run over us. But there are some corpses lying out on the top, with plenty of rats around them, so they won't go hungry!

The next day we are told an attack is to be made at dawn. On this I notice a weird change comes over the men; they become strangely religious as the fear of death comes near. The Catholics are telling their beads, the others reading their Testaments and Bibles. Some are crying, and all are silent—petrified with cold and horror.

As the hour for attack draws near, the officers become pale and anxious. They keep looking at their watches. They try to smile as they shake hands with the sergeants, whispering “Good-bye." in case the worst happens.

The noise of the artillery is now awful; every gun, from a trench mortar to a big naval gun, is blazing away, smashing down barbed wire entanglements and parapets. The world seems to have gone raving mad. In an hour it will be dawn, and then—?

The men in the front trench have now fixed their bayonets, and thrown off unnecessary equipment. They dare not look at each other; steel helmets are firmly fixed as they await the word. Suddenly a young officer pushes his way to a place prepared in the parapet for jumping over. In his hand he holds a whistle. He gives a shrill blast, and is over the top, the others scrambling after him, and at this moment the artillery ceases.

Through the periscopes we watch the progress. Some are falling and throw up their arms and spin round as the bullets strike them. Some are dashing madly on. The machine-guns of the enemy are spitting forth thousands of fiery bullets. The men still unhurt have passed through the German entanglements and are on their parapets. The bombs and bayonets are busy. Strong men are falling like corn before the sickle. Now the fighting is in the enemy's trenches. Both explosions and revolver shots are heard. Our men have captured the trench and are consolidating it. In “ No-man’s-land ” the stretcher-bearers are busy, dragging in the dead and wounded. The doctors in the trench dressing station are hastily bandaging wounds and injecting “anti-lockjaw” serum. The sight is indescribable. Groans and cries rend the air as the dead and wounded lie together in the dressing-station. An ashy pallor is on their faces.

And now the enemy observers see that we occupy the trench and immediately signal to their artillery. Hundreds of shells now pour upon our comrades, smashing up the position they have occupied and burying them beneath the debris. And thus the hideous game goes on and many brave lives are sacrificed. The hidden artillery has robbed them of victory; for in this trench warfare neither side conquers.

In the rear trench we shiver through the long days and night ; some of us have lost our brothers and comrades ; we curse the war and the folly of the men who make it. “Why were we born ?’’ I have heard men say.

Some get “trench feet” : others contract “trench fever’’ and scabies; some begin to develop pneumonia and consumption. We lean against the side of the trench, our teeth a-chatter, and try to sleep, when suddenly a gong rings, for a gas attack has been launched. We hastily don our gas helmets and “stand to" .

'The enemy trench mortars are throwing devilish bombs. We reply, dealing death and destruction to the unseen foe. . . .

At last we are going to be relieved, and another regiment is to take our place We begin slowly to thread our way through the communication trench. A sergeant reads the roll: to many names there is no reply. The remnants reach the road behind the trenches. It is pitch dark and the rain is falling in torrents. Most of us are limping, and some have taken off their boots. We are caked in mud from head to foot. There is no music now, no “glory of war,” no cheering crowds. We are but the human fuel that feeds the engine of Armageddon. On, on we stagger back to camp. Some relieve their emotions by weeping. The man next to me is kissing the image of Christ on his rosary, the officers are silent ; too weak and worn even to give orders. . . .

There are no cheers now when we pass other regiments going up to the trenches, as there were in the early days of the war. We look at each other and say, “Poor devils! God help them.’’

As day advances we reach the camp. Worn out and aching with rheumatism, we stagger to the tents and fall asleep. And in that sleep there are some who dream of a wiser age to come, when man will have learnt the truth about the “glory of war.”

We who are the victims of this carnage know that this “glory” does not exist. Would to God that the warring nations could know the same! — say I. Yes, the poor soldier is the victim all the time. There is no animosity between the fighting men. Wounded British, Germans, and French fraternise with each other, exchange cigarettes, and sympathise with the others’ wounds and pains. I have seen German prisoners walking arm-in-arm with our soldiers.

“Going into action”! Yes, let us go into action, but not to slay and torture, but to build up a happier and brighter world redeemed from the folly and brutality of war.

II. THE CASUALTY STATION.

We sat in our dug-out reading a fragment of an old newspaper; it contained a vivid description of a casualty station written by a well-known newspaper owner. In glowing phrases it told of the cheerfulness of the wounded and the laughter and happiness which prevailed in the “wards.” In short, from the description, one would really believe that men loved being torn and maimed, and that they were in a place of amusement instead of a human shamble-house which baffles description.

My chum tossed the paper to me and said: “Ye gods! that people should believe that! To think that those at home are so gulled! If they could only see a dressing or ambulance station for half an hour, such a demand for peace would be made that no Government could stop it.”

My chum was right. I will now try to describe a casualty station, but no words of mine can suffice; only a Zola or a Dickens could give even a faint description of the horrors which one sees —horrors that eat into the soul and make one wonder whether it is a hideous scene from Inferno or a reality.

Imagine a large field with about twenty marquees erected for the reception of the wounded. The bitter wind blows through the canvas, and a solemn air of death and suffering pervades the whole. (When I was there, nurses and doctors were nearly knee-deep in mud.) The never-ending stream of Red Cross motors is coming and going. The R.A.M.C. men swiftly and gently lift the stretchers from the care and take them to the reception marquee. Many of the wounded are groaning, and some are already dead. They are smothered with mud, while fear and pain are written on their pale faces. A doctor makes a hurried examination, then each case is taken to the “ward ” allotted to that class of injury. Here the wounded are stripped, their clothes thrown aside or sent to the destructor. Now the ward- doctor makes a minute examination.

The surgeons are busy in the operating tent; as case after case comes and goes, shattered legs and arms are quickly amputated. The bucket outside contains hands and feet, pieces of jaw, and the rest. I see an orderly hurrying along carrying a big white leg to the destructor, thinking nothing of this, for it is an hourly occurrence.

Have you ever seen a butcher after a day’s killing? Well, that is how the surgeons appear. They work day and night, clever, self sacrificing men, appalled at the awfulness of their duties. The nurses appear somewhat hysterical, the result of doing hours of arduous duty and bloody work. Their aprons are saturated with gore. In the wards are the mangled and the dying. Many cases are too awful for operation, and nothing can be done to relieve them, so the orderly injects morphia and the poor wretches pass quietly away.

A priest is in attendance; sometimes his words console the one passing hence; but I, who have seen many men die, say unhesitatingly that, instead of dying gladly (as the corrupt Press declares), they do so with appalling regret, feeling inwardly that cruel war is wrong, and that they ought not to die so young.

But the ambulance train has arrived to take the sufferers to England. The most dangerous cases are placed on the train first. What a sigh of relief is given as they know that they are going to “Blighty”—away from the infernal scenes of carnage and slaughter! Now the train is nearly full of “lying cases,” and the sitting cases come next An orderly is leading some men—they are blind; and here are some men apparently unharmed—what is the matter with them? They are deaf and dumb from shellshock. Next come the insane—they are strongly guarded and locked up in a special compartment. Some are shouting and raving—it is nothing, only war!

A blast from the whistle and the train is off. Doctors and nurses give a sigh of relief, but it is of short duration, for'“gas cases” are arriving in the hospital. The poor wretches are propped up in the open air; they are struggling and gasping for breath. Some are already turning blue as the muceous fluid slowly rises in the lungs and chokes them. Some are dead and fall over with faces distorted and hands clenched in their awful struggle. . . .

In a field at the back the dead are lying; they, are clad in their shirts with a blanket thrown over them. Let us pull aside the blanket and look! The first has no face—a big blob of wadding hides the mangled features. The next is white as marble—he has bled to death. 'The next has been shot through the brain; it took him three days to die, poor chap, and he was conscious to the end. How tenacious some are of life!

The “sanitary men” are busy tying up the corpses, whose shroud is a blanket and a bit of string. A few handfuls of chloride of lime are thrown over the naked bodies, and sometimes in the mouths. The sanitary men work in silence, they are so horrified and appalled: see! that young man’s hair is going white, and there is a strange look in his eyes.

The corpses are pulled about as the slaughter-man pulls his dead sheep. There are post-mortem examinations on some of them, and for this purpose intestines and pieces of lung are in a bucket outside a tent, so that the young surgeons may get good practice.

The dead are now ready for burying. Four old French peasants are digging graves. There is not time to dig them very deep, and they fill with water at once. Quickly the corpses are dropped in the water as the parson reads a few words from the Burial Service and the wet earth is thrown in.

As we go back to the hospital the night is made hideous with the groans and shrieks of men in agony. Sleep is often impossible, and sometimes I have been awake all night hearing the awful cries of these poor men. Many are passing away, and as dawn begins to break a silence reigns from which we know that these mud-stained, weary warriors have passed into the Great Beyond.

And so it goes on, day after day, week after week, the never-ending stream of maimed and mangled bodies. Strong, happy, smiling men are knocked into bundles of bloody rags!

Yes, the Press and politicians may talk of the “glory of war,” but the casualty stations tell the true tale. And when that wealthy newspaper owner writes about the wounded, let him tell the real truth, and not deceive the public with cruel lies, which help to lengthen the war and thus bring death and indescribable suffering to thousands.

This is what we in the trenches think!