Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front
The first history of World War I to place centre-stage the British soldier who fought in the trenches, this superb and important book tells the story of an epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it.Of the six million men who served in the British army, nearly one million lost their lives and over two million were wounded. This is the story of these men – epitomised by the character of Sgt Tommy Atkins – and the women they left behind.Using previously unseen letters, diaries, memoirs and poetry from the years 1914-1918, Richard Holmes paints a moving picture of the generation that fought and died in the mud of Flanders. He follows men whose mental health was forever destroyed by shell shock, women who lost husbands and brothers in the same afternoon and those who wrote at lunchtime and died before tea.Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, this book tells the real story of trench warfare, the strength and fallibility of the human spirit, the individuals behind an epic event, and their legacy. It is an emotional and unforgettable masterpiece from one of our most important historians.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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Tommy
The British Soldier On The Western Front 1914–1918
Richard Holmes
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2004
Copyright © Richard Holmes 2004
PS section copyright © Patrick Bishop 2005
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007383481
Version date: 2018-07-18
Some images were unavailable for the electronic edition.
For Lizzie, with love and admiration
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
NEW ARMY
CHAIN OF COMMAND
ONE LONG LOAF?
A VIEW FROM THE PARAPET
FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
BASE DETAILS
A MILITARY REVOLUTION
BROTHER LEAD AND SISTER STEEL
THE BOLD BOMBARDIER
THE DEVIL’S BREATH
BRAZEN CHARIOTS
SWORD AND PISTOL
WITH THE RANK AND PAY OF A SAPPER
WOEFUL CRIMSON
THE WILL OF AN ARMY
MAN AND GOD
FRIEND AND FOE
MORALE AND DISCIPLINE
Contemporaries instinctively called it Great: La Grande Guerre, Weltkrieg, and we can easily see why. Of course it was not the largest single event of world history: that ghastly honour must go to the Second World War, which in terms of human suffering and material destruction was infinitely worse for the world as a whole. But for Britain alone the First World War caused more casualties, which partly accounts for the fact that it is remembered in a particular way here. Many who lived through both conflicts agreed with Harold Macmillan and J. B. Priestley that the First World War was a more significant watershed than the Second. Barbara Tuchman may have been the first to use the analogy of 1914–18 as an iron gate separating the present from the past, and it has proved to be an enduring and powerful image ever since.
So there it lies, overgrown, like the trenches that still lace the landscape of Northern France, but somehow dug deep into our consciousness. And it usually enters our minds not as history, but as literature. One of the problems with trying to write about the First World War is that most people have already read Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks before you get to them. I am certainly not the first historian to complain that it was far too literary a war. Cyril Falls began the process even before the Second World War; Correlli Barnett continued the movement thirty years ago and only last year, Brian Bond’s important book The Unquiet Western Front fired yet another well-aimed burst into an enemy who shows little sign of falling, but lurches on, stick grenades in hand, intent on doing yet more mischief to our understanding. Professor Bond suggests that ‘the “real” historical war abruptly ceased to exist in November 1918’.>1 What followed was the resurrection and reworking of the war largely in terms of novels, memoirs and war literature in general. Indeed, Paul Fussell, in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, maintained that the war was uniquely awful and as such lay ‘outside history’, explicable primarily through its literature.
This process has not simply affected the way we think of history: it strikes a resonance through the present and on into the future. Omer Bartov described what he termed ‘the invention of memory’ when he considered the effect of war literature in both France and Germany. ‘Experience of loss and trauma extends beyond personal recollection,’ he argued, ‘and comes to encompass both individual and collective expectations of the future.’>2 It seems to me that Bartov has identified a key element of the process. By studying the war as literature we do not simply colour our view of the past and make it all but impossible to teach the war as history. We go on to tint our picture of the present and our image of the future too. When Second World War soldiers wanted to describe something going particularly badly they spoke of ‘The biggest balls-up since the Somme.’ For years it was impossible to attend a military presentation without a clip of
