Tommy (74 page)

Ernst Junger, on the other side of the line, argued that:

Private Stephen Graham was taught that when trench-clearing: ‘The second bayonet man kills the wounded… You cannot afford to be encumbered by wounded enemies lying about your feet. Don't be squeamish. The army provides you with a good pair of boots: you know how to use them.'
¹⁷⁵
George Coppard reported ‘an unexpected bonus' when two German wagons left it too late to get away from the front line with the sun coming up behind them and were ruthlessly machine-gunned, ‘but there was genuine regret about the horses'.
¹⁷⁶

Next, successful surrender usually depended on a brief but clear break between combat and capitulation. Even then it was a dangerous time, as Guy Chapman discovered when talking to a moody company commander:

An experienced sergeant in Fred Hodges's battalion, wounded, his platoon cut off by a box barrage and badly outnumbered, told his men: ‘You can't do anything, lads. Put up your hands and cry
Kamerad.'
¹⁷⁸
Prompt surrender saved their lives. On 28 March 1918 the Rain brothers, both privates in the Queen's Westminsters, realised that their position had been encircled – a nearby company of the London Rifle Brigade, seeing the way things were going, had already given in ‘with practically no resistance' – and concluded that surrender was the best option. They dumped their kit in their trench, and then walked over the parapet with their hands high above their heads.

Particularly detested adversaries might well be killed on the spot: we have already seen the fate of the
Minenwerfer
man who fell into the hands of the Royal Welch at Fricourt. When Alan Hanbury Sparrow's battalion was clearing a village in 1914 it was ordered that all concealed snipers and machine-gunners were to be killed out of hand: ‘the only way to stop it is to let these fellows realize it means certain death'.
¹⁸⁰
Some Germans lay up in shell holes on the Somme as the mid-September attack rolled over them.

Lieutenant Stephen Stokes, Welsh Guards, was grenaded by one of these men, but the bomb left him uninjured. It was the German's last weapon, and he then tried to surrender:

And there were periods when men were disinclined to accept almost any sort of surrender. The German gas attack of April 1915 caused widespread resentment amongst British and French alike, and it was not a good time for a German to be captured. Captain Arthur Smith saw few prisoners then, ‘because most of them were killed before they had a chance to surrender & also the British soldier is none too keen to make prisoners of them after this gas business'.
¹⁸²
Captain Lord Stanhope saw a French general interview a prisoner, discover that he had been involved in the gas attack, and order. ‘Sergeant major… take a file of men and take this man down to the wall at the bottom of the garden.'.
¹⁸³
Tempers had worn thin on the Somme by 26 July, as Graham Greenwell wrote: ‘feelings run a bit too high to make the unwounded prisoner's lot a happy one. A whole crowd who came towards our own trenches with their hands up were mown down by their machine guns as well as ours.'
¹⁸⁴
In April 1917 a group of German prisoners detained in a quarry just behind the Arras front unwisely applauded a successful counterattack, and were immediately grenaded by their infuriated escort. And while most front-line soldiers had a healthy scepticism about tales of German barbarism, rare first-hand experience of real atrocities put iron into the soul. In November 1918 Guy Chapman's company:

Simply having his surrender accepted did not guarantee a man's life. Both sides sent men captured in major attacks back across No Man's Land under escort. Often there was a barrage falling between the high-water mark of the attack and friendly trenches, and escorts sometimes concluded that it was too dangerous to take their prisoners back, and killed them. Crozier believed that: ‘The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope, seldom oversteps the mark of barbaric propriety in France, save occasionally to kill prisoners he cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines.'
¹⁸⁶
Sometimes prisoners were killed by accident. The war diary of 10/Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers tells how, on 1 July 1916, prisoners taken by the first attacking wave were so anxious to reach the safety of the British line that they ran back, collided with the second assaulting wave coming forward, ‘and many were bayoneted in the heat of the moment'.

But sometimes it was deliberate. Frank Richards saw one of his comrades escorting six German prisoners towards Clapham Junction on the Menin Road during Third Ypres. The man left him in no doubt as to what was to happen.

Richards remarked that while he had heard of such things happening, this was the only case that he could vouch for, and added that ‘the loss of his pal had upset him very much'.
¹⁸⁷

Fury at friends lost could indeed drive moderate men over the edge. At Ypres in 1917 Norman Gladden watched: ‘two of our runners sniping at German prisoners… Both were normal, kindly fellows in ordinary times, loving fathers of families… the particular incident was unusual in my experience, the aberration of individuals under incalculable stress.'
¹⁸⁸
An ‘old time sergeant' in Stephen Graham's Scots Guards battalion approached his officer, who was ‘a poet, and wrote some very charming lyrics and had a taste in art,' saluted and asked: ‘Leave to shoot the prisoners, sir?' He declared that it was to avenge his brother's death, and duly shot the Germans one after the other. Some men approved, but others were clearly shocked.
¹⁸⁹
And there were soldiers who enjoyed killing, in a boyish, destructive, self-willed way. On 10 June 1915 one private soldier wrote that:

Such incidents demonstrate just how much depended on officers setting a standard of behaviour. Some battalions had an unofficial policy of discouraging the taking of prisoners. Private Arthur Hubbard of the London Scottish told his mother from the Somme that:

Such cases were the exception rather than the rule, and even a hard man like Frank Crozier insisted that prisoners should be protected.

On 1 July 1916 he watched ‘an advancing crowd of field grey… fall like grass before the scythe' and forcefully intervened when he could see that they were prisoners.
¹⁹²
But he admitted that there were times when it was simply not possible to accept surrenders. While supervising the collection of wounded from the front line on the night of 1 July 1916 he recalled how he was

When the fury had passed, men could be extraordinarily kind to prisoners. Henry Williamson retained one dominating image of breaking the Hindenburg line in 1918. It was:

Ernest Parker led a party which captured a German in a night raid near Ypres, and: ‘When we arrived at the Canal bank dugouts… the men fell out with their prisoner to have breakfast… we were amused to discover the troops regaling the German prisoner with rum and cigarettes'.
¹⁹⁵
Edward Vaughan captured a bedraggled group of Germans near Langemarck on 27 August 1917. He could not spare a man to escort them back, ‘so I put them into shell holes with my men who made a great fuss of them, sharing their scanty rations with them'.
¹⁹⁶
And when Crozier's men captured two German electricians near Cambrai in 1917, his batman, David Starrett, at once started a conversation with them in pidgin French, gave them cigarettes and tried to scrounge them some food.

Starrett's kindness was handsomely rewarded, because the prisoners then revealed that there was a large booby trap in the cellar: had they been summarily executed it would never have been discovered till it destroyed Crozier's headquarters.

T
he glue which holds armies together has a complex and variable composition, which includes not only major components like belief in a nation's war aims and hostility towards the enemy, but small, and often more powerful, ones like the bonds that link men in their sections, companies and battalions. The formal structure of the military hierarchy, backed by the constraints of discipline, also plays its part, and wise leaders recognise that the stick of discipline must work alongside carrots such as sport, entertainment, decorations and leave.

When a man joined the army he became subject to a code of discipline enshrined in the annual Army Act and
King's Regulations for the Army,
a legal code explained by
The Manual of Military Law.
The latter emphasised that ‘in all times and in all places, the conduct of officers and soldiers as such is regulated by military law'.
¹⁹⁸
It was pervasive and intrusive, and created a wide range of offences which had no civil equivalents. Although discipline had a wholly formal aspect, it was hedged about with unofficial sanctions. Thus while it was an offence under military law for a superior to strike an inferior, many units tolerated unofficial violence. Captain Gerald Burgoyne told his company NCOs in 1914 that ‘I could not be bothered with petty crime, they must make the men obey them, how I did not care; and that I would back them up in all they did. ‘ Not long afterwards he saw a fatigue party, ‘the men all over the place, no discipline, and the corporal in charge, useless… I ran out and gave him two under the jaw.' And when a man was late on parade, pleading that ‘I was just getting a drop of tea wetted,' Burgoyne ‘lifted him a couple of the best and kicked him till he ran.'
¹⁹⁹

In December 1914 a company quartermaster sergeant in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers found that a corporal – ‘a smart-looking man but a poor non-commissioned officer' – had been seen striking a brave but scruffy soldier. The company quartermaster sergeant duly laid him out. The corporal complained of assault, but the company commander decided that justice would be done if the CQMS knocked the corporal down once more.
²⁰⁰
Corporal Charles Arnold was cheeked by a man in his section, but ‘instead of putting him in the guard room which was the right place for him I gave him a good hiding… Perhaps you may call me a cruel bounder [but] the fellow thanked me afterwards because if I had put him in the guard room he would have got about three months imprisonment.'
²⁰¹
Unofficial punishments were often winked at by officers. In 1914 Captain Lord Stanhope's company contained a man who was:

Some regular NCOs maintained that they did not need to go to these lengths: it was possible to ‘sweat a man' quite legally so that he would get ever deeper into trouble and finish up in military prison.

A soldier of the rank of corporal or below formally charged with an offence (rather than being simply cuffed round the head or being told to clean out the latrines) would appear before his company commander. The company commander might either deal with it himself, or remand the soldier to the commanding officer. Fines (for instance, the second offence of drunkenness rated 2/6d and the third 5 shillings) and periods of CB (confined to barracks) were the most common penalties at this level. ‘Company orders' (‘company memoranda' for the Guards) could be very rough justice indeed, with a presumption of innocence often replaced by the unstated conviction that the man would not have been charged if he was not guilty. In 1917 Private William Albery, under training in England, was brought up before his company commander for a trivial misdemeanour.

In addition to being confined to barracks ‘CB' involved performing ‘fatigue duties to the fullest possible extent, with a view to relieving well-conducted soldiers therefrom'.
²⁰⁴
And there were extra parades, including pack drill, under the provost sergeant, who supervised the regimental police. Harry Ogle experienced it himself:

A soldier who went before the commanding officer appeared on battalion orders, this time with the regimental sergeant major marching in the capless prisoner between a two-man escort. The CO's powers of punishment were wider than those of a company commander: he could detain a man, or award him Field Punishment No. 1, for up to twenty-eight days, and could reduce corporals and lance corporals to the ranks. A man could elect for trial by court martial, or be remanded by the CO, and senior NCOs and officers alike were sent for court martial for all but the most minor offences, for the commanding officer could neither imprison them nor deprive them of their rank.

Flogging in the army had been abolished in peacetime in 1868, on active service in 1881 and in military prisons as recently as 1907. The old army believed that there remained a requirement for a campaign punishment which was exemplary and yet did not result in an individual escaping from duty. The result was Field Punishment No. 1, which could be awarded by either a CO or a court martial. A prisoner sentenced to it forfeited his pay, could, as the
Manual of Military Law
explained, be kept in fetters or handcuffs so as to prevent his escape, and ‘may be attached for a period or periods not exceeding two hours in any one day to a fixed object, but he must not be so attached during more than three out of four consecutive days, nor during more than twenty-one days in all'. He could be subjected to ‘labour, employment and restraint' as if he was undergoing a sentence of hard labour. Field Punishment No. 2 was precisely the same, but did not include the daily attachment to a ‘fixed object'.
²⁰⁶

Field Punishment No. 1 was awarded on 60,210 occasions during the First World War, and was thus infinitely more common than the death penalty: an average of about one soldier in fifty serving in France received it, although this figure does not reflect the fact that several men received it more than once. There were 3,080 death sentences, of which 346 were actually carried out, all but 37 of them for offences which attracted the death penalty only under military law. We ought, perhaps, not to be surprised that Field Punishment No. l, so very visible, features far more frequently in letters and diaries than the death penalty. The latter aroused powerful emotions, though men were divided over it. Both Rowland Feilding and Julian Bickersteth were amongst the many who deplored it. However, Private Arthur Moss of 1/Royal Fusiliers thought it ‘very severe but it is done as an example to maintain discipline in the service',
²⁰⁷
and Frederic Manning's comrades agreed that ‘Miller the deserter' ought to be shot for leaving them in the lurch.

Field punishment, however, attracted almost as much resentment amongst officers, who were not subject to it, as amongst soldiers, who were. It was regarded as degrading, primitive and wholly out of place in a citizen army fighting a great war. Lieutenant F. P. Roe was amongst the many young officers shocked by their first encounter with it.

Handcuffing to a wheel met the remit of regulations, but some units tied a man with his arms outstretched, earning the punishment the nickname ‘crucifixion'. In August 1916 Victor Archard, a tank gunner, noted that one of his comrades was given fourteen days' Field Punishment No. 1 for ‘swearing about an officer in his absence and to his own fellow gunners,' and soon afterwards:

In Arthur Moss's regular battalion field punishment was made even more severe by ‘tying a man to a wheel & turning same round ever so long until the head is downwards. Shocking punishment & nasty to look at…'
²¹⁰

As we might expect, unit tolerance of field punishment varied.

Australians sometimes released British soldiers they encountered tied up, and threatened the regimental sergeant major or the regimental police if they tried to re-attach them to wheel or fence. Private Marshall of the Accrington Pals described an incident during the battalion's brief sojourn in Egypt in 1915–16.

He was scarcely exaggerating. In some units the practice was so universally abhorred that it was simply ritualised, and the culprit was shut in a hut with the handcuffs thrown in after him.

But there remained an argument that commanding officers needed a severe and immediate sanction at their disposal. Douglas Wimberley, reflecting on his time as machine-gun company commander, affirmed that:

And in 1917 the humane Rowland Feilding complained of:

Of the types of court martial prescribed by the
Manual of Military Law
the Field General Court Martial (FGCM) was that which applied on active service on the Western Front. It consisted of a president, an officer not below the rank of captain, although a major was preferable, and two other officers who had held commissions for at least a year. The officer who convened the trial could not sit on the court, nor could any witness or individual involved with the investigation of the case. The accused could object to the composition of the court, was entitled to speak in his own defence and could be assisted by a ‘prisoner's friend'. When the court discussed its verdict the most junior officer voted first in an effort to prevent a dominant senior officer imposing his will. Sentences, including recommendations for mercy, were passed on up the chain of command for confirmation by the commander in chief. A FGCM could try officers, and had at its disposal the full range of penalties prescribed by the Army Act, but there had to be unanimity if the death penalty was to be imposed.
²¹⁴

This form of court martial had the stated aim of providing ‘for the speedy trial of offences committed abroad or on active service in cases where it is not practicable… to try such offences by an ordinary general court-martial'. The major difference between it and the general court martial was the absence of a legally-qualified judge advocate who advised the court. However, from early 1916 the post of court-martial officer was introduced. These personnel were drawn from experienced lawyers already serving in the army, and were expected to ‘keep the court straight on matters of law and procedure'. Despite assertions that these were ‘kangaroo courts' it is evident that they were bound by strict rules of procedure, and abundant evidence suggests both that their members took their duties seriously, and that formation commanders and eventually the commander in chief looked hard at their proceedings. Nor is it true to say that courts martial were generally composed of officers without front-line experience sitting in judgment on men from the trenches.