Victoria's Cross (16 page)

Of my memories of life in the trenches, the one thing I cherish more than anything else is the comradeship that grew up between us as a result of the way of life we were compelled to lead – living together under the open sky, night and day, fair weather or foul, witnessing death or injury, helping in matters of urgency, and above all, facing
the enemy. Such situations were the solid foundation on which our comradeship was built.
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Received wisdom is that the First War was loathed by all participants, but this is incorrect; Pollard was intensely proud of being part of the Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest regiment in the British army, where, he said, ‘every man was a potential officer'. He recalled with gusto his first night patrol into No Man's Land: ‘I was thrilled to the core. This was man's work indeed . . . To me these excursions were everything. The danger acted like a drug quickening my pulses. At last I was doing something worthwhile. I was as happy as a sand boy.'
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Pollard's memoir is no literary feast, but his reflections, although often clichéd, have a direct, earthy quality. His weapon of choice was the trench grenade which, with its highly destructive shrapnel, was much more efficient than a cumbersome rifle in shrouded trench mazes, where confusion often required instant reaction. Pollard, an irrepressible and perpetually optimistic survivor, who was wounded on more than one occasion, lacked the capacity for deep intellectual introspection, but was probably all the better a soldier for that. Siegfried Sassoon believed that the ‘better the soldier, the more limited is his outlook . . . One cannot be a useful officer and a reader of imaginative literature at the same time . . . The mechanical stupidity of infantry soldiering is the antithesis of intelligent thinking.'
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After recuperating from a wound, Pollard returned to the trenches as soon as possible: ‘It was good to be back in the line again. One felt one was pulling one's weight for the Country, doing the right thing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. After a nine months' gap the knowledge that the Huns were just opposite waiting for an opportunity to kill me if I gave them a chance added a spice to life which I had missed.'
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A typical letter home to Pollard's mother signed off: ‘Best of spirits and having a good time. By the way, I have killed another Hun. Hurrah! Well, cheerioh!'
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Pollard gained his VC for action on 29 April 1917 at Gavrelle, France, when, under fierce attack and sustaining heavy casualties, troops of various units became disorganized and began to flee in panic. Pollard – by then a second lieutenant – took four comrades and started a bombing counterattack, pressing it home until his small band had broken the enemy attack, regained all lost ground, and gained much more. At Pollard's VC investiture at Buckingham Palace, twenty-four VCs were given, including six posthumously:

I stood with my arms straight down by my sides and my chest swelling my tunic. ‘God save our gracious King.' Wasn't that what we were fighting for? To save the King and all he stood for – our great Nation? . . . Every one of us had done his damnedest and we were there to receive our rewards. Not that we needed them. People do not go into action with the idea of winning the Victoria Cross. They go with the bare intention of doing their duty. The decoration merely happens.
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Clearly Pollard's VC was thoroughly deserved, both personally and politically, yet a total absence of fear, either in the moment or over a much longer term – not uncommon among VC holders – is difficult to see as courage. The American general George Patton believed of soldiers that ‘the more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened'.
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On that basis, Pollard was exceptionally dim; he did not know fear. This same point has been made by William I. Miller: intelligence finds ‘good reasons for worry, whereas those without that ability sleep well and march blithely on'.
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Is a trained killer – or even possibly a natural born one, such as Pollard seems to have been – unbalanced? In war, society needs determined killers; yet if unbalanced, even if they are as effective as Pollard, do they merit a VC? Pollard gained the VC, as did Albert Ball, the RFC pilot; but they had completely different attitudes to their task. Two days before Ball died, he wrote to his father: ‘I do get tired of living to kill and I'm really beginning to feel
like a murderer. Shall be so pleased when I have finished.'
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Over the course of the First World War – as the certainty of victory receded, and, for monarchy, politicians and generals, the political and personal cost of possible defeat became more unbearable – Pollard's certainty rather than Ball's doubts was increasingly valued.

Bishop's and Cornwell's VCs were two of 634 distributed during the First World War, including one for the American Unknown Soldier interred at Arlington Cemetery.
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Bestowed in November 1921, the British government had been backed into this overtly political gesture; the previous month Washington had given the Medal of Honor to Britain's Unknown Soldier, entombed in Westminster Abbey. London resisted pressure to give VCs to the other allies. In a curt memo from the War Office in 1924, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary brushed aside agitation to bestow the VC on France's Unknown Warrior, ignoring the 1921 US precedent. The view of the War Office was that ‘we should be well advised not to re-open the question of the exchange of decorations for Unknown Warriors. We have already put the Italians off and we could hardly deal with one of the Allies without admitting the others.'
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For approximately every 14,000 men mobilized in the British and Dominions' forces during the First World War, one VC was awarded – a parsimonious rate of distribution compared to the relative largesse of the nineteenth century. Between June 1857, backdated to the start of the Crimean War, and 1 August 1914, 522 VCs were given – more than one-third of the total awarded as of 2014.

That there was an informal tightening around the neck of the VC sack during the progress of the First, and even more evidently the Second World War, is clear. How is this to be explained? Not by reference to courage
per se
, however that might be defined, but by reference to how courageous acts were sliced and diced by the creation of new medals and awards, and by the increased propaganda and morale-boosting
value of the VC. The VC came to be seen by the establishment not just as the pre-eminent military decoration, but as a useful tool that could be used to give heart to a nation. Too many heroes would dilute the overall impact and potentially have a diminishing return for national morale.

Some other military decoration sacks – usually those pertaining to officers – were not so tightly held. As Sir Martin Lindsay, a former officer, wrote, if you had the right connections you would in all likelihood get some very prestigious medals:

[I]n spite of the provision of the Royal Warrant which instituted the DSO, that it was for ‘special service in action,' staff officers below the rank of general were awarded the DSO or the MC . . . Such was the indignation of the Brigade of Guards when the 6th Earl of Rosebery [Harry Primrose, who served as Camp Commandant and ADC to General Allenby] emerged at the end of the war with the DSO and MC earned at Army HQ without a day spent at the front with his regiment, that for a few years he was virtually ostracised.
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The creation of new gallantry decorations, particularly the Military Cross and Military Medal, served a dual function: the supposed distinctiveness of the VC could be preserved, by limiting the numbers handed out, while the authorities were able to reward clearly courageous acts according to different grades. The invention of the MC and the MM obviously had nothing to do with any objective change in the definition of courage, were such even possible; rather it was because from 1914 onwards there was
too much
courage. It was not merely the case that technology, with its manifold means of long-range destruction, depersonalized warfare; it was also that anonymous barbarity became ubiquitous. Officers who had gained their professionalism in the Victorian era struggled to cope with the loss of an important sustaining ideal – that killing another human being might be done
chivalrously. General Sir Ian Hamilton, who led the failed expedition at Gallipoli, summed up the changed nature of warfare:

From Ypres onwards trenches and barbed wire fastened their paralysing grip upon the field . . . war sank into the lowest depths of beastliness and degeneration. The wonder of war, the glory of war, the adventure of war, the art of war all hung on its shifting scenery. For years the Armies had to eat, drink, sleep amidst their own putrefactions. Bit by bit the old campaigner's memories and young soldier's dreams were engulfed in machinery and mud.
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The first commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to Flanders in 1914 was General Sir John French, who, at sixty-two, was still physically vigorous; but French and many of his contemporaries had learned their profession on horseback and were baffled by the technicalities of the new warfare. War obviously meant killing, but that need not, should not, entail bestiality; French was unable to grasp that honour and glory died with the birth of the machine-gun, and that beastliness was endemic to the new battlefield. In 1919 French saw no absurdity in writing that soldiers, ‘emulating the knights of old, should honour a brave enemy only second to a comrade, and like them, rejoice to split a friendly lance today and ride boot to boot in the charge tomorrow'.
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The VC was born in an era when Sir John French's understanding of warfare was a plausible model; by 1915 only Victorian soldiers could still cleave to that limited horizon. Prior to 1914 the individual could
matter
; a spirited gallop, a determined rally, the rescue of a wounded officer – all could be noble
and
practical acts that might not only be physically seen, but were regarded as intrinsically important for morale: a courageous battlefield act might inspire others to greater determination or bravery, or even turn the tide. By 1916 there was a need for heroes, not just to maintain morale at home, but to inspire
the conscripted millions who were not professional soldiers. In a post-war committee investigating the incidence of shell shock, Lord Southborough referred to a witness statement by Lieutenant Colonel H. Clay, Chief Recruiting Staff Officer of the London District, who said ‘that the men were trained to the last pitch when they went out in 1914. It was different with the unfortunate man taken suddenly out of an office. He was brought up and rushed in twelve weeks straight into the trenches.'
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As the First World War's Western Front settled into apparently endless trench warfare, the scope for the individual to make a difference shrank almost to the point of invisibility; the mass mattered infinitely more. A single word – attrition – came to define the nature of the battlefield. The war gained a lastingly gloom-laden reputation, assisted by Winston Churchill's ersatz Augustan rhetoric:

No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion. No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. It will appear not only horrible but incredible to future generations that such doctrines should have been imposed by the military profession upon the ardent and heroic populations who yielded themselves to their orders.
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Individual soldiers on the Western Front rarely saw the enemy; 59 per cent of casualties were due to artillery.
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If Sir John French embodied the warrior spirit of the nineteenth century, Pollard spoke for that of the twentieth. Pollard's VC – single-minded aggression, the killing of the enemy, bestiality if necessary – would become the archetype for VCs awarded during the later stages of the First War and certainly throughout the Second.

When the war started in 1914, the War Office was swamped by demands from field officers who, in their own small quarter of the Flanders battlefields, almost daily encountered the kind of self-sacrificial bravery that they imagined – often correctly – might merit a VC.
The end result was that those senior officers based in London who had the task of sifting VC recommendations pushed the requirement for VC eligibility – bowing to pressure when necessary to award VCs such as Cornwell's – beyond anything previously seen, without any reference to the VC warrant. Their in-trays were lightened by two developments: the invention of new medals and the informal acceptance of posthumous VCs. Following the crumbling of Edward VII's resistance to posthumous awards in 1907, a dead soldier could get the VC, even though the extant VC warrant made no posthumous provision and would not do so before 1920.
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And, steadily, the authorities realized that one way to measure supreme courage might, if the circumstances were right, be a gallant, or at least a useful, death.

Yet the informal acceptance of posthumous VCs merely allowed another anomaly to surface. During the First War posthumous awards of lesser decorations – the DSO, the MC, the DCM, the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) and the DSM (Distinguished Service Medal) – were not permissible. This discrepancy provoked considerable resentment from soldiers, heartache for families of dead servicemen, and pointed exchanges in Parliament. The impossibility of posthumous decorations – other than the VC or a Mention in Despatches – led to some extraordinary anomalies. Corporal James McCarthy of the 1st Royal Irish Regiment, stationed at Ain Kanish in Palestine, was cleaning grenades in barracks on 24 January 1918, when the fuse of one grenade started fizzing. He carried it outside, intending to throw it to safety, but fellow soldiers were standing about and it must be supposed he realized it could not be thrown anywhere without risking the lives of others. He was last seen holding the grenade tightly in both hands and close to his body. The explosion killed him but no one else was injured. McCarthy received a posthumous gold Albert Medal, originally created for civilians who saved life at sea and in 1877 extended to acts ‘performed on land . . . in preventing accidents in
mines, on railways, and at fires, and from other perils on the shore'.
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McCarthy was obviously no civilian, but the Albert Medal could at least be given posthumously; the only alternative military decorations that were posthumously available were the VC or a Mention in Despatches. There were ten incidents when more than one Albert Medal was awarded between 1914 and 1918, and sixty-nine occasions when a single medal was granted.
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