"Six Weeks to Live"

That was the stark heading to a book review in Saturday's edition of The Daily Mail.  Again, it rams home to me the catastrophic nature of the First World War, a misnomer if ever there was one because it was always and only a European war with occasional ripples reaching outside.  Christopher Hudson reviews the book by John Lewis-Stempel(*):

They were the sons of mothers who still thought of them as boys.  What they knew of life came from the school-room - many of them left university to go almost immediately to command a platoon in France. [...]

The average life expectancy was just six weeks. In the first year one in seven of them were killed and one in five were wounded - by far the highest casualty rate in the war. About 33,000 officers were left disabled at the war’s end.

How did they do it?  Why did they do it?

These were mostly boarding school-educated children brought up in a regime of muscular ­Christianity, team games, cold showers and immersion in history and the classics. They read Henty and Kipling and the famous ­Newbolt poem with the line, ‘Play up, play up, and play the game!’.  They knew that King and Country were in peril: if the Kaiser seized the French and Belgian coastlines he would control the Channel, Britain’s lifeline.  So here they were, living in a dream of chivalry in which all the romantic, valorous episodes from past history rose up before them and beckoned them to their fate.

The dream rapidly became a nightmare and as a slight antidote to the tedious and mendacious Left-wing attacks on Eton and the public schools:

The nine major public schools all recorded casualty rates of around 20 per cent; 1,157 of them came from Eton alone. In the front-line trenches the greatest fear of these lieutenants and captains was that they might not match up to those paragons of history and fiction.  When the time came it was the fear of cowardice, of showing fear before their men that drove them on.

‘For very shame, pull yourself together, man,’ thinks Captain Hanbury-Sparrow of 2/Royal ­Berkshires, as he later recorded in his diaries. ‘Set them an example ... With a dozen pairs of eyes watching you, unstrap your field-glasses and, kneeling, look over the parapet.’

After a night of tossing and turning, relief came with the daylight.  The officers clutched their watches, then came the order: ‘Fix bayonets!’ And with it the ­knowledge there was no going back.  It was followed by the adrenaline rush as the ­running charge began, the yelling and shouting while the bullets zipped past like a horde of bees.

Two posts ago I meandered helplessly on the intractable subject of causality.  Faced with the crippling, in all senses of the word, fact that the average life expectancy for an officer on the western front was six weeks, I am forced to ponder on the effect this monstrous cull of the brightest, the bravest and the best, has had on our national life, even, or especially, four generations later.  An intractable computation, I suspect, but the end result is no less tangible for that.

(*) Six Weeks:  The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War by John Lewis-Stempel, (Weidenfeld).

Comments

[hank]

David

The US military reported similar figures for WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. In a WWII assult landing in the Pacific there would be virtually 100% cassulties amoung platoon leaders in the first 24 hours.

When my fathers Division went ashore in Japan after the surrender they went in assult formtion because they did know what to expect. He was a platoon leader in the first wave. If it wasn't for the Atom Bomb I wouldn't be here to add comments.

[David Duff]

Hank, your dad was one of hundreds of thousands saved by the Bombs, a fact still ignored by too many ignorant anti-American Leftists.