The Great Silence (5 page)

Meanwhile the Government’s morale-boosting propaganda had contributed in large part to the ignorance at home of the true state of affairs abroad. Positive stories written by journalists who feared prosecution if they told the truth, including Philip Gibbs of the
Daily Telegraph
, were designed to put the best possible slant on the news. Soldiers who longed to describe the dreadful reality of warfare had their letters censored. Rumours were rife. The 18-year-old Barbara Cartland believed the stories that ‘Germans were extracting fat from human corpses which were tied together and sent from France in cattle-trucks’.

An impression of amateurishness, even larkiness at home disturbed the sceptical soldier. Girls from munitions factories spent their wages on gramophones and tickets to dance halls and cinemas, while smug young women from the aristocracy considered themselves heroic in adopting flattering nurse’s uniform though wholly unqualified for the task. Country girls working on the land paraded around in ‘some kind of fancy dress with buttons and shoulder straps, breeches and puttees’ as Philip Gibbs scathingly described the land army outfits, while at the same time there were men working the land who were morally opposed to killing, and had remained in England, struggling with their consciences, often restless and troubled by the decision they had made.

Censorship operated on newspapers, especially on Lord North-cliffe’s
Daily Mail
, while sections of the Home Front tried to continue with their lives in much same way they always had, the upper classes in particular clinging to the old existence. Octogenarian Lord Fitzhardinge remained at his twelfth-century, ‘pink mammoth’ turreted, silver-roofed Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, continuing to hunt four days a week across the water meadows that led to the Severn. To the delight of Violet Keppel his young house guest, daughter of EdwardVII’s long-standing mistress Alice Keppel, his huntsmen dressed ‘in saffron yellow’, while his Lordship wore a Persian cat called Omar wrapped around his neck like some exotic serpent.

Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and a leading society beauty, felt that many of those left at home were ‘frenziedly dancing a tarantella’ in order to prevent the increasingly fatal news damaging an increasingly fragile national morale. Footmen still served at the grand tables and were still, Diana Manners noticed, ‘blinded by powder’ used for whitening the hair: the excess floated towards the soup bowl as the servant bent forward to ladle out the vichyssoise. In 1916 a sexy, teasing song and dance routine called ‘Tanko’, designed to poke fun at the new armadillo-like war machine, the tank, was causing hilarity at the Palace Theatre in London. Siegfried Sassoon was enraged by the irresponsible descriptions in the press of these ‘waddling toads’ and by the amused public response. Watching a London theatre audience laughing while men were dying inspired his poem ‘Blighters’ in response to the inappropriate mockery.

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home’

And there’d be no more jokes in music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

How were soldiers to find a way to describe to their isolated, sometimes disbelieving families what happened out there? Although the sound of gunfire was occasionally audible on this side of the Channel, there was an inevitable remoteness about the battlefield. Comfort for those in love but separated might be found in pulling a ragged silk stocking belonging to a sweetheart over the head before hoping for sleep. The soldier’s way of life in war remained unrecognisable to anyone who had not experienced it. One soldier, Alfred Finnigan, called it ‘hell with the lid off’. How were these men to convincingly describe the rats as large as otters who gorged themselves on the human flesh that lay rotting all around them, or the stomach-churning death-reek whose smell could not be shifted even by the scent of the strongest Turkish cigarette? The rats had developed a reaction to the meat of dead men. Eating it would make their faces swell and whiten visibly at the top of their greasy, grey bodies. Luminous in the darkness of the bottom of a muddy trench, these ghostly creatures would move swiftly towards sleeping men, waking them with a start as they dragged their tails across the men’s faces in the constant search for another meal. Lice were transparent when hungry, but turned black after sucking on blood. The poet Robert Graves met a group of men trying to remove the lice from one another. They were discussing whether to kill the young or the old insects. ‘Morgan here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones will die of grief,’ Graves was told as the men continued their debate. ‘But Parry here says that the young ones are easier to kill and you can catch the old ones when they come to the funeral.’

Crawling lice crept in a steady file over the soldiers’ filthy clothing. They could be temporarily halted by turning a vest inside out or by lighting a match along the seams of trousers, only for the insects to re-emerge moments later. Body heat itself encouraged the hatching of the eggs. Bluebottles and cockroaches fed off the live bodies.

The mud, the rats, the wet, the dirt and the lack of medicine
meant that almost every soldier in the trenches was affected at times by trench foot. The infection, an extreme form of athlete’s foot, produced a swelling the pain of which was so acute that men dreaded the slightest physical proximity, lest the foot be casually brushed against, causing them to scream out in agony.

The daily food rations included twenty ounces of bread, three ounces of cheese, eight ounces of vegetables, four ounces of jam, four ounces of butter - flavoured by half an ounce of salt, one thirty-sixth of an ounce of pepper and one twentieth of mustard. But the irregular supply made meals achingly inadequate. The quality was disgusting, the quantity pathetic. The bully beef and bullet-hard dog biscuits provided little comfort or nourishment. Twenty ounces of tobacco a day was allocated per man and the rare treat of a bar of chocolate, to be shared between three. Half a gill of rum, amounting to one double measure, or when supplies were exhausted, a pint of porter (the soldier’s version of lager) had promised a tantalising moment of numbness before the recipient was expected to go and fight for his life. One soldier, Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall, who did not like the taste, saved his ration, finding that the alcohol helped as a sort of anaesthetic for the pain he suffered from trench foot.

In between the conflict, boredom was intense. Albert remembered from his childhood the ‘glamour of the redcoats’ as he watched them in admiration returning to his village after the Boer War. There was little glamour surrounding him in his trench. He missed four village Boxing Day celebrations, a day when the villagers would tie a lead and collar on all the pets, making a fine procession of pigs, goats, ferrets, cats, dogs, tame mice, and the splendid cockerel. The menagerie would race towards a greased pole in the middle of the green. The first to reach the dead duck attached to the top was the winner. Sergeant Jack Dinham found himself thinking of Otford, his village in Kent where at the Boxing Day meet the hounds would be treated to porridge bubbling in huge steaming metal pans, while in summer the Vicar, the Reverend William Lutyens, cricket-mad brother of the famous architect, would be seen in church, his white cricket flannels just visible beneath his cassock. Jack had wondered if his job at Knole, the big house nearby where he worked as Lord Sackville’s coachman, would still be open to him after the war.

While away at war, Siegfried Sassoon missed any sense of intellectual stimulus, or even the reassurance of clarity of thought. ‘Mental activity was clogged and hindered by gross physical actualities.’ Loneliness was constant. Men missed women. Most of all they missed their mothers and called aloud for them with increasing frequency. They sang a song together:

H stands for happiness that you should find there

O stands for old folks in the old armchair

M stands for mother; you’ll never find another, no matter where you roam

E stands for everyone as everyone knows

H.O.M.E. spells home.

The men missed their wives and their fiancées, too. The Government and the army chiefs were well aware of the physical longings and the dangers of frustrated abstinence in an army made up largely of thousands of lusty young men, confused and ashamed of their feelings. Thousands of young British men had grown up in families where bodily functions and the natural instincts and affections of marriage went largely unmentioned. Even the coy enquiry concerning the proper functioning of the digestive system, ‘Are you consti?’, from a mother to her child was too intimate to express in full.

Not many men however remained ignorant of the ever-widening spread of venereal disease. Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to ‘comfort’ men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French, waiting for them in abandoned chateaux, village houses, hay barns, caravans, farm buildings and the upper floors of inns. Different coloured lanterns indicated the rank of clientele allowed entry. Blue denoted a place reserved for officers, the light sometimes swinging from a pole that stood next to a sign declaring ‘No Admittance for Dogs and Soldiers’. Common soldiers were directed towards the red light establishments. Sometimes the queues outside these places could number a hundred men or more, with three worn-out French women waiting inside.

The price per slot varied from two and a half to ten francs or two to eight shillings, although a bartering system involving bread
and sausages was also prevalent. One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt-smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.

These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the ‘joy’ of physical love. Even the virginal Prince of Wales went in 1916 with some fellow officers to watch naked girls performing erotic poses in a brothel in Calais, concluding from his own ‘first insight into such things’ that it was a ‘perfectly filthy and revolting sight’.

Only the Austrian army paid much attention to either contraception or hygiene, the prostitute requiring her ‘guest’ to use a ‘preventative instrument’; if he refused, the girl was to ‘lubricate his organ with borated Vaseline’, a paste made of boric acid, and after the experience was concluded, he was required to visit the ‘disinfectant room’. No such rules had applied to British troops and the threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other.
The Field Almanac
issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to ‘ease themselves promiscuously’, although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves. ‘There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for ‘acts of gross indecency with another
male person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military Law’.

At home morale was shored up by the belief in the value of sacrifice and the reflected pride it bestowed on those who survived. Edward Grey, the former Foreign Secretary, had said, ‘None of us who give our sons in this war are so much to be pitied as those who have no sons to give.’ For those who had died young, the lines of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem with its Shakespearian echoes continued to reverberate as the idealisation and myth-making of sacrifice was encouraged.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

Nearly ten million dead soldiers and sailors and airmen had died in the conflict, three quarters of a million from Britain. A further twelve and a half million had been wounded; nearly one and three quarter million of these were British. An estimated 160,000 women lost husbands and double that number of children emerged fatherless at the end of the war. An estimated 30 per cent of all men aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were now dead. There were no figures for the fiancées, girlfriends, mothers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends for whom life had changed for ever. On 11 November 1918 the colossal roar finally stopped. Those who had survived hoped the wound would begin to heal in silence. After the catastrophic death of Victorian certainties, silence was beginning to seem like the only possible articulation of the truth.

Armistice Day, 11 November 1918

Just after breakfast on a Monday morning in the middle of November, Maude Onions, the young woman from Liverpool who had become a signaller with the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, sat down at her stenograph, the shorthand machine she used in the little signal office at Boulogne. Her job was to relay messages to the front. That morning she tapped out the following words: