Drink (56 page)

On the rare occasions that alcohol was forbidden to fighting troops, they resented its absence. Sassoon, returning to action after being wounded, and forced to serve in a different battalion, noted that its commander “had made himself obnoxiously conspicuous by forbidding the Rum Ration” and that “the ‘No Rum Division’ failed to appreciate their uniqueness in the expeditionary force.”
⁶²
Official rations were supplemented with private stocks: Cherry brandy in silver hip flasks, a bottle of whisky hidden under a trench coat, a tin cup of bartered wine. Moreover, a market economy of sorts was in action behind the lines, and resting troops might spend their wages as they pleased. Most of those stationed in France gravitated toward the
estaminets—
cafés set up by enterprising civilians in the villages and towns close to the fighting that sold simple foods such as eggs and fries, and beer and wine. The latter was usually sweetened with sugar, as the British Tommies found the thin
vin du pays
too sour for their taste. Unable to pronounce
vin blanc,
they called it
plonk,
a name still in service for cheap wine of indifferent quality.

Plonk, and whatever else was available, was consumed principally for its intoxicating effects. However, British soldiers did not drink to forget, or for temporary oblivion. They drank to bond—to confirm the friendships they had formed in the trenches. Their accounts praise and elevate this camaraderie as the only redeeming feature of the conflict. Their attitude was shared by their French allies. The
poilus,
or French common soldiers, also received an alcohol ration, consisting of a quarter liter of
pinard
wine per man per day. They were further entitled to brandy, though this was issued irregularly—witness the complaint of a poilu in Henri Barbusse’s
Under Fire,
the first novel to be written during the war to picture the savagery of the western front: “We have the right to get [Cognac] in the trenches—seeing how it was voted somewhere, I don’t know when or where, but I know it was—and in the three days we’ve been here they’ve been dishing out our brandy ration on the end of a fork.” Like their British counterparts, the French soldiers supplemented their alcohol rations with purchases whenever they had the opportunity to buy. Since they were fighting on native soil they acquired their wine from householders as well as cafés, estaminets, and itinerant vendors. Wine held a special value to the French soldiers—as part of their heritage, it was one of the things they were fighting for. This sentimental aspect is apparent in
Under Fire,
in which the poilus reminisce about the local wine of their various parts of France—its relative strength, and flavors, and the memories associated with it: “To drink some wine from the South—and even from his own special South—and drink a lot of it . . . How great it would be to see life in the best of colors again, if only for a day! Ah, yes! He needs wine! He dreams of getting drunk! —when the war is over. . . .”

On the other side of no-man’s-land, German front-line troops were also issued alcohol. In the first year of fighting, according to one combatant, “there were liberal helpings of a pale red brandy, which had a strong taste of methylated spirits, but wasn’t to be sneezed at in the cold wet weather. We drank it out of our mess-tin lids.” While the regularity of supply suffered as the war wore on, the Germans did their best to ensure that hard liquor reached the trenches, in the belief that it was of benefit to the morale of the fighting soldier. However, as such issues became rare, the troops took the appearance of spirits as a signal that they were soon to be sent over the top, and considered them to be a benediction for the damned.

The Germans also provided alcoholic drinks to soldiers resting behind the lines. Indeed, the ancient association of drinking and fighting in German warrior culture seems to have been encouraged. According to the writer Ernst Jünger, when he was sent to an officer training school after distinguishing himself in action: “By day, the young people were honed into soldiers by all the rules of the art, while in the evenings, they and their teachers assembled around vast barrels brought over from the stores . . . to display much the same degree of discipline and commitment—to drinking.” Jünger also noted that some units possessed their own Beer King, who was responsible for punishing breaches of drinking etiquette among his subjects. The Beer Kings were modeled on their counterparts at German universities, and the respective monarchs of different units would challenge one another to duels, which were settled with snowballs or similarly inoffensive weapons. The persistence of such peacetime traditions in a war zone had no parallel among the officers of French or British troops, who practiced less formal styles of collective intoxication. The habit, however, of meeting to drink to their fallen acquaintances was common to all, and Jünger speaks for both sides when he declares that “such libations after a successfully endured engagement are among the fondest memories an old warrior may have. Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off and drink a silent toast to their comrades.”

The situation on the home fronts of the combatant nations was very different. In many of them World War I represented a turning point in governmental attitudes toward drinking. “Whole industrial societies were engaged against one another, their lives organized for war virtually from top to bottom,” and in order to control these machines, state intervention escalated. Limitations were imposed on freedom of movement, of association, and of expression; rationing and other austerity measures were introduced. In some countries public drunkenness was made a criminal offense for the first time, and everywhere resources were diverted from the manufacture of alcoholic beverages to the production of explosives, food, and fuel.

In Great Britain, taxes on beer were raised, drinking hours were curtailed, and output was restricted. Curbs on civilian drinking commenced in 1914 with the Defense of the Realm Act, which in combination with the Intoxicating Liquor (Temporary Restrictions) Act of the same year, cut the opening hours of British pubs from seventeen and a half hours per day to five and a half hours on weekdays and five hours on Sundays. Even tighter restrictions were imposed around munitions factories, whose workers were rumored to prefer the charms of Bacchus to those of Mars and to be turning out dud shells after their liquid lunches. In some areas where munitions were produced, such as Gretna Green in Scotland, the government nationalized the pubs and breweries so as to ensure it had direct control over local drinking habits. The British temperance movement enjoyed a brief wartime revival. Enthused by the comments of David Lloyd George, the munitions minister, who declared that “we are fighting Germans, Austrians, and Drink
;
and, so far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is Drink,” two million people signed a petition calling for total Prohibition, which was delivered to Parliament in 1916.

Although the temperance petition was ignored, steps were taken to reduce the volume of brewing. By 1917, brewers were allowed to produce only one-third of the quantity of “standard” beer, which was deemed to have an OG of 1055, that had been brewed prewar. Since the restriction was based on strength, the brewers tried to keep volume up by making weaker beer, which used less grain. Production nonetheless fell from thirty million barrels in 1914 to nineteen million in 1917, and the resulting “Government ale,” or “Lloyd George’s beer,” which was only three-quarters of the strength of prewar brews, was mocked in the press and the music halls. Despite its feeble kick, demand outstripped supply, and the Ministry of Food was reduced to issuing notices to hoteliers requesting them to ask their presumably middle-class guests to “refrain from drinking beer, in order that there may be more beer for the working classes.” To add insult to injury, the duty on beer was increased from seven shillings nine pence per barrel in 1914 to two pounds ten shillings in 1918, which more than doubled the price of a pint. Many of the wartime austerity measures survived the conflict—duty was ramped up again in 1919 and again the following year, the “Temporary Restrictions” on pub opening times remained in place until 2005, and Britons were condemned to drinking weak, expensive beer for generations to come.

The production and sale of beverage alcohol was also curbed in Commonwealth countries, notably in Canada. Distilled alcohol was an important raw material, after conversion to acetone, in the manufacture of the smokeless explosive cordite. Competition between drinkers and munitions for the same fluid was resolved in favor of the war effort and Alberta and Ontario introduced Prohibition in 1916, followed by Quebec in 1918. Canada had flirted with Prohibition before the war—a referendum had been held on the matter in 1898 that had revealed a majority in favor of a ban in all provinces bar Quebec, but no action had been taken at the federal level, and only Prince Edward Island had proscribed drinking. Prohibition was repealed postwar in all provinces, although it was retained in Prince Edward Island until 1948.

The advent of mechanized warfare likewise led to limitations on recreational drinking in France. Absinthe was banned in 1915: The nation could not afford to lose potential soldiers to the debilitating influence of la Fée Verte. The licensing system of cafés was revised in the same year, with the aim of reducing their numbers, and public intoxication was deemed a crime for the first time. Moreover, prostitutes were banned from cafés, as well as barmaids under eighteen years of age, unless they belonged to the family of the owner. While such legislative measures were debated with a great deal of passion and enacted with some fanfare, they had less effect on the number of drinking places than the conflict itself. Entire villages and towns were obliterated in the Somme and the Marne regions of France, and the country lost perhaps an eighth of its watering holes to enemy action. Its vineyards also suffered: Those in the Champagne district, in particular, were the scenes of intense combat. In September 1914, the Germans occupied Reims, the principal city of the region. When they were forced back out by a counterattack, many were found to be so drunk on looted champagne that they could not use their weapons and, according to a French officer, were “harvested like grapes.” Fighting raged around the town for a further three and a half years, during which 40 percent of the surrounding vineyards were destroyed and the city itself flattened by artillery bombardments. The extensive network of chalk cellars under Reims was converted into a subterranean fortress, with field hospitals and barracks situated among the champagne bins. The winegrowers, however, still tended their surviving vines, and the vintages of 1914, 1915, and 1917 turned out to be some of the best of the twentieth century.

Vineyards in other parts of France suffered from a shortage of labor, and the war years saw an overall decline in wine production. Consumption, however, remained fairly constant, thanks to the estaminets, the pinard ration of the poilus, and government support: In 1917 the French National Assembly voted to give a bottle of champagne to every one of its seven million servicemen. French consumption of alcoholic beverages other than wine, in contrast, fell precipitously—the quantity of beer drunk dropped by a third and that of spirits by nearly two-thirds.

In Germany, the civilian supply of alcoholic drinks collapsed during World War I. By 1918 beer production was only 25 percent of prewar levels, and the output of wine was substantially reduced when Germany was forced to cede Alsace and Lorraine back to France at the end of the conflict. The deprivation suffered by German drinkers was, however, light in comparison to that of their Russian counterparts. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, “the first workers’ and peasant’s government” outlawed vodka and other forms of alcoholic drinks, and the ban remained in place until 1924. Draconian as such measures seemed, they, too, paled in comparison to the restrictions suffered by both the soldiers and civilians of the last Allied power to join the fighting.

In April 1917, following German submarine attacks on American shipping, the United States entered World War I against the aggressor and prepared to send an American expeditionary force to fight in France. It was an immense challenge: The American prewar army had a total strength, including national guardsmen, of just over two hundred thousand—a tiny force in comparison to the millions of men fielded by the European powers. Moreover, its weapons and tactics had become superseded by new developments since 1914. The American army had no tanks, only a handful of machine guns, ancient artillery, and was organized according to drills perfected in the Civil War. Despite the logistical difficulties of recruiting, training, equipping, and transporting a viable fighting force to Europe, five regiments under General Pershing were shipped to France in June 1917, and by October the first units of the AEF were in action on the western front.

Unlike their British and French allies, the
doughboys,
as American soldiers were known, were expected to serve dry. They did not receive alcohol as part of their rations, nor could they obtain it in camp. This deprivation resulted from the Canteen Act of 1901, a piece of ASL-INSPIRED legislation, which prohibited “the sale of, or dealing in, beer, wine, or any intoxicating liquors by any person in any post exchange or canteen or army transport or upon any premises used for military purposes by the United States.” The Canteen Act was strengthened in 1917 on the eve of battle by Section 12 of the Selective Service Act, which established a total prohibition zone within a five-mile radius of American camps. The same law also made it illegal for anyone anywhere to sell intoxicating beverages to a member of the armed forces in uniform. The aim was to give America “the soberest, cleanest, and healthiest fighting men the world has ever known.”

Not only was Prohibition decreed by law, but the benefits of total abstinence were also lauded in army manuals. Chapter II—“Personal Hygiene”—of the
U.S. Army Manual of Military Training
gave the following directions regarding booze to its readers: “Do not drink whiskey or beer, especially in the field. It will weaken you and favor heat exhaustion, sunstroke, frostbite, and other serious troubles. Alcohol muddles the mind and clouds thoughts, and so causes a feeling of carelessness and silliness that may ruin some military plan, or give the whole thing away to the enemy and with it the lives of yourself and your comrades. The soldier who drinks alcohol will be among the first to fall out exhausted.”