Our Land at War E-Book

Nick Bosanquet

• Herausgeber: Spellmount
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War was a human catastrophe but it also saw a dynamic development of new weapons and a new kind of war; between the lions and the donkeys came the managers – and the workers - who transformed a nation into a war machine in forty-eight months. Our Land at War takes you on a journey to the key places that witnessed this war effort and those at all levels of society who brought about the change. The war created a new world of vast hutted camps and a new kind of transport system that even involved a lighted barrage across the Channel. From Aldershot – the home of the British Army - to the War Office in Whitehall, from Scapa Flow to Yarmouth, this is Britain's war mapped for the first time. Nick Bosanquet uncovers where this national revolution took place, exploring Britain's Great War heritage and helping you to locate the hidden history of war at the end of your street.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge a considerable debt to the recent volume With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 by Professor David Stevenson. This presents a balanced picture of the achievements as well as the tragedies and is a milestone in writing about the First World War. Special thanks to Adrian Denney for his help with the text and illustrations; to Jo DeVries and Rebecca Newton, editors at The History Press who have been most supportive; to Khuong To for his help with photographs; to Paul Stamper, Wayne Cocroft and Nicky Hughes of English Heritage for their help and encouragement; to Tara Finn on the search for Room 40; to Carole Harrington in Scarborough; and to Emily Mayhew for wise advice.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The British Army

2 The Allies - Shock Troops of the British Empire

– and the Associated Americans

3 The Munitions Surprise

4 The Supply Lifelines

5 New Weapons

6 The War at Sea

7 The Air War

8 Medical and Health Services

9 Intelligence and Propaganda

10 The Supreme Command: from Muddle to Mission

Postscript: The British People at War

The Land at War

Guide

Bibliography

Copyright

Introduction

The First World War was a challenge to a generation of Britons. Unexpected, not of their own making: at first a dark, threatening shadow over remote areas such as the seas off Chile, then closing into every street and family in the nation.

There is a compelling image of the war: soldiers in the mud on the Western Front across Belgium and France. But this is only one part of the story. Even for the British Army on the Western Front, by 1918 only 450,000 of the 1.4 million troops serving there were infantry, and even these infantry were no longer in fixed trench lines. Many more were in artillery, supplies and the Royal Air Force (RAF) in a new kind of machine war. Further back from the trenches the war created a war zone that took in most of the UK. This was the wider Western Front. Every town and every street was linked to the front line through service and through contribution to the war of the guns. The war mobilised not just soldiers but women workers, teenagers and even school children, who contributed their pennies to the war loans, picked fruit in summer and pushed sacks of coal in winter. Unlike the Second World War, which was fought a long way from home, the front line of the First World War was very close to home, a shadow on every coast and in the skies over the UK.

In this book we trace the main sites for this wider war effort – which can be found mostly in the UK – but to these we should add the hubs of Queenstown (Cobh) in Ireland and Calais in France. For a generation it was an unavoidable challenge that turned into a ‘test to destruction’. Along with sorrow there must surely be pride at how the people of Britain faced up to it. During the First World War Centenary, we remember not just the leaders and the millions who served, but also the courage of small, disparate groups facing a powerful enemy: the signs of their effort – and often of their sacrifice – are there in your town. Also described are the main sites and how to get to them, which I hope will help you to set out on your personal quest to find this generation and to honour them.

The fifty-two months of war created a changed future as well as a threatening present, forcing an acceleration of personal, social and economic change with results for years to come. Here we trace the presence of the war in the British Isles – the key sites where this change took place.

The changes followed from the extraordinary effort of popular mobilisation. The cost in lives and disability was enormous. Familiar now – but not then – are the pictures of large cemeteries, but there is another side to the story: pride in success. The War Memorial outside St George’s Hall in Liverpool recorded ‘Out of the North Country came a mighty host …’ This generation met the challenge of a front line 60 miles from the Kent Coast (reduced to 40 miles by the German offensive in April 1918). From 1916 onwards gunfire could often be heard inland. This generation experienced the first air attacks, where Zeppelins roamed for hours over much of England. In the war at sea there were changes in the axis of threat, with a shift from mines and cruisers in the North Sea to submarines in the Atlantic approaches.

Many books were published recording the town and city experience. One of the best was Leeds in the Great War:

What was it like to be alive then? Let us see with your eyes and feel with your heart and brain the bursting of the news on a generation that hardly believed in the possibility of war, the continuous departure of the troops until all the young manhood of Leeds had gone, the return of the wounded, the arrival of the lists of those who would never return, the darkened streets, the shortened food supply, the searchlights sweeping the clouds at night, the alarm of a Zeppelin attack, the hope and the despair, and all the pathos and the riot, all the spontaneous outburst of feelings that defy analysis, when the Armistice came, and at last there was an end.1

The book went on to pay tribute to the ‘unparalleled endurance of pain and suffering shown by both sides and all classes and the wonderful power of organisation and initiative to meet unforeseen difficulties shown by our own country’.

On 27 October 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George (the first ‘ranker’ to reach the office) moved a vote of thanks in the House of Commons to the officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the British armies in the field. ‘Our expeditionary force numbered at the beginning of the war 160,000 men. Our expeditionary force today numbers over 3,000,000, probably the greatest feat of military organisation in the history of the world.’2

The spirit of service: relatives of Paul Stamper (English Heritage lead on the First World War) in Leicestershire, names unknown.

One year later, on 29 October 1918, the British Army was able to mount a victory parade through Lille, where fit and well-equipped troops marched through the city for two and a half hours to the delirious joy of the local citizens after four long years of harsh occupation, cut off from all contact with their partners or families in France and living under threat of starvation, execution and deportation.3 A few days later there were similar scenes in Belgian towns that had been occupied by the German Army.

This was a war of small crews and sections: pilots in single-seater aircraft and workers by the machine in the munitions factory; the trawler crew sweeping mines in rough winter seas; the infantry section in a shell hole on the Western Front; the woman workers in the eleventh hour of a shift filling shells; the Royal Flying Corps pilot freezing at 8,000ft without oxygen. The war depended on their courage and initiative. Battle destroyed hierarchy. The command-and-control gap once battle had started has been well recognised for the Western Front, where troops might be cut off for hours, but there was a similar gap in many other situations in an age before instant communication. Members of small teams were on their own, with the higher command hours away. This was as true at sea and in the air as on the Western Front.

The war led to seven key changes:

1. A new industrial world managed by ‘men of push and go’. Between the ‘lions’ and the ‘donkeys’ came the managers. By 1916:

The whole of the North Country and the whole of the Midlands have in fact become a vast arsenal. Standing on an eminence in the North, one may by day watch ascending the smoke of from 400 to 500 munitions works, and by night at many a point in the Midland counties one may survey an encircling zone of flames as they belch forth from the chimneys of the engineering works of war.4

British industry had to take to mass production and giant factories of a kind rarely seen before the war. The largest was Gretna Green, some 9 miles long:

One remembers coming past Gretna for the last time during the war in the gathering gloom of an autumn evening and strangely impressive it was in the half light. The place set on a turf bog with nitric and sulphuric acid plant and great leaden basins in which the dangerous materials were handled had a sinister aloof air well suited to its grim business.5

Munitions works were sited in open country with low hills behind them (Chilwell, Banbury and Gretna), in order to contain explosions. The Arsenal at Woolwich extended to 700 acres and at its peak in 1918 employed some 70,000 people. For the first time the UK came to know mass production and the American innovation of assembly lines. Most of the pre-war production had come from workshops and mills; the First World War demanded the introduction of the modern factory, with the government paying for extensions at every pre-war industrial site. Every valley wore a rim of fire.

2. Millions were on the move, the new soldiers to camps and civilians to the cities. London, Birmingham and Glasgow expanded. The main newcomers to the big cities were women and young adults. In Birmingham, in the 1911 census, males over 18 numbered 246,881 and females 283,366. By the spring of 1918 the respective totals were 200,251 and 323,911.6

The Munitions Works – a rim of fire in every valley.

Millions were on the move. This 1915 postcard is from Auntie Eliza living in Pocklington, Yorkshire, to her nephew Jack.

Much of the coast became a restricted area from Southampton round to Hull, with training grounds, airfields (142 landing strips in Kent alone) and naval bases in the Dover Straits and Harwich. There were seaplane and dirigible bases at Yarmouth and Folkestone and further north the repair base at Invergordon and the main base of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. Smaller towns like Todmorden and Hove lost residents, as the men went into the army and the women to the munitions works. The countryside also changed, with 2 million more acres under the plough and the first use of 4,000 American Ford tractors (government-owned). The word ‘allotment’ was more widely used and thousands dug plots, some on railway embankments. By 31 December 1917 there were 185,147 allotments reported.7

3. New groups with political and economic influence. According to suffragist and early feminist Dame Millicent Fawcett, women began the war as serfs and ended it as independent citizens. Women at the Wimbledon train depot in early 1915 were the first to wear trousers – inspiration for the later trouser suit.8 (Munitions workers in France and Germany continued to wear long skirts.) The role of women was vital, not just in munitions but in the transport system and in farming. The expansion of UK farming output in 1917 was one more vital contribution, but women were not the only group of new contributors. The war saw the coming of more affluent teenagers as young workers in the six years before conscription. They also served as boy scouts on guard duty and as messengers. For many there was access to training and expertise. The main losers were older men, excluded from Poor Law accommodation converted into hospitals. Rising prices ate into the unchanged 5s pension.

4. Changes in class relations. The lady and her maid could both be employed in the same munitions works. Lloyd George recorded in his memoirs for 1915 Balfour’s experience when, invited as a venerable ex-prime minister to sit in on negotiations about dilution (the effect of female entry into the workforce in terms of pay and conditions) in a room off Whitehall containing Queen Anne’s throne, ‘He saw those stalwart artisans leaning against and sitting on the steps of the throne of the dead Queen and on equal terms negotiating conditions with the government of the day upon a question vitally affecting the conduct of a great war. Queen Anne was indeed dead.’9 (Though it should be remembered that despite 1 million women being members of trade unions in 1918, by the beginning of the 1930s a woman’s wage had returned to the pre-war rate of half that of her male co-worker in more industries than previously.) King George V, as part of the munitions drive, inaugurated the first meet-the-people tours. He praised the munitions work: ‘Words like these uttered “man to man” ran like wildfire through the works.’10

New currents of social mobility affected the army, as General Douglas Haig recorded in his final despatch:

A schoolmaster, a lawyer, a taxicab driver and an ex-sergeant major have commanded brigades: a mess sergeant, a railway signalman, a coal miner, a market gardener, an assistant secretary to a haberdashers company, a quartermaster sergeant and many private soldiers have risen to command battalions; clerks have commanded batteries.11

In the German Army there were some very strong pleas for promotion on merit so as to place the most efficient officers in positions of higher command: ‘The military cabinet in Berlin was not to be moved by such propositions.’12 Division remained in opportunities and accents but the working class was no longer a discrete social body and some considered that social changes ‘created a sense of unease in the population’.13

5. Rising living standards. For many, especially in the new munitions factories, the war brought better pay and much improved living standards. Civilian mortality and infant mortality dropped sharply. There is a remarkable photograph (seehere) of young boys of the same school year in Bermondsey in 1894 and 1924 and most of the obvious change took place under wartime conditions. There were fears of food shortages and queues in 1917 but the Rhondda scheme of rationing shared out the available supplies according to the new ration book (seehere). There was a reduction in alcohol consumption: beer production fell from 36 million barrels in 1914 to 14 million in 1917 (and the beer was weaker)14 and spirits production for domestic consumption was banned. The higher earnings were spent on food not drink, and not just in Carlisle and Enfield, where the pubs were nationalised. With rising living standards came mass entertainment and cinema-going. Charlie Chaplin became the first star (though much of the additional earnings of his fans went to buy war bonds).

6. Reshaping the transport system. The railways were used more intensively and came to be the main carriers of heavy freight, as coastal shipping was blocked by the submarine threat. The railway companies had to find routes across the Thames to the south coast. They also adapted to local commuting to large munitions plants on isolated sites, which had to draw their workforce from a wide area.

Progress across the war: boys of the same age in a school in Bermondsey, London in 1894 and 1924.

This was the beginning of the motor age, replacing the horse with the truck and the car. By 1920 the horse was relegated to local traffic. The war also saw the coming of the working-class driver as well as the woman driver.

7. The rise in power of the state over every aspect of the citizen’s lives. This started with the 8 million letters sent to every household as a joint message from all political parties in 1914. Soon after, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) gave government far-reaching discretionary powers. One key date was 15 August 1915. Under the National Registration Act, an army of 150,000 volunteers worked so that ‘every male and female in Great Britain between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five was thereby registered on a separate card giving all the information necessary for recruiting and industrial purposes’.15 In Birmingham the new Hollerith automatic equipment processed the cards. There was censorship, then conscription from 1917. State control extended even to the distribution of contraceptives. National efficiency became a matter for the new ministries in Whitehall. ‘The most important of these were the Ministry of Shipping, the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Pensions to which were added at later dates the Ministry of Reconstruction, the Ministry of National Service and the Ministry of the Air.’16

The war and all it connoted filled people’s minds. Everything one did or read or thought was coloured by it. The war’s effects at home and abroad, its bearing on the relationships of life and national affairs, its searching of the heart and stirring of the conscience, kept people at high tension.

Such relief as Leeds people were able to obtain from the common strain, the almost monotonous round of war work and of ordinary duties done in unaccustomed circumstances, was afforded only by fleeting hours of relaxation at theatres, cinemas and concerts or week-ends at holiday resorts. But even then one could not get away from reminders of the world crisis, from troubled thought and conversation concerning the next thing to be done; it all weighed heavily as the burden borne by Bunyan’s pilgrim when he set forth with the cry ‘What shall I do to be saved?’17

The war was thought to have changed everything:

There are many persons who firmly believe that the intense gunfire often induced rain and caused cold winds. In south-east England the wetness was phenomenal during the war and it is certainly remarkable that the meteorological conditions prevailing in Great Britain should have been so abnormal.18

The New State; Separation Allowance for Mrs J. Proven Dunfermline for Private A.E. Proven serving Royal Engineers Chatham.

The History of Leeds and other sources presented the main phases of the war at home year by year, which we can summarise as follows:

1914: Shock of war – the inconceivable became real. Build-up of military training. Kitchener and the New Army. Disasters at sea and bombardment of Scarborough and other coastal towns.

1915: Intensive training. Zeppelin raids frequent. Building of new war economy. Sinking of Lusitania.

1916: New war economy in full swing. Somme casualties in every home. Coasts and air quieter.

1917: Rigid system of fuel and food control, leading to ration books for all. Gotha Raids and intensive war against U-boats.

1918: Grim determination to carry on. King’s call for Intercession on first Sunday of 1918. Great shock of German March Offensive. Fast-moving political and military events. The war then finished as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had started at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

The Zeppelin raid on the night of 31 March to 1 April 1916, when Zeppelins were roaming over the UK.

The beginning of the end: Zeppelin L15 sinking off the Kentish Coast on 1 April 1916, brought down by anti-aircraft fire.

The wider Western Front stretched back from the battle zones into most of the UK and beyond into the worldwide supply operation. Where were the key sites for this national mobilisation? How did this generation meet a challenge greater than that faced by any other since the English Civil War, 270 years earlier?

Notes

1 Scott, W.H., Leeds in the Great War, Leeds City Council, 1923, p. xi.

2 Lloyd George, Hansard, 27 October 1917.

3 McPhail, Helen, The Long Silence, Taurus, 1999, p. 193.

4 Yates, L.K., The Woman’s Part: A Record of Munition Work, Hodder and Stoughton, p. 8.

5 Dewar, G.A.B., The Great Munitions Feat, Constable, 1921, p. 133.

6 Brazier, R.H. and Sandford. E., Birmingham in the Great War, Cornish Brothers, 1921, p. 286.

7The War Cabinet, Report for the Year 1917, Cd 9005, HMSO, 1918.

8 Pratt, E.A., British Railways in the Great War, Selwyn and Blount, 1919, p. 456.

9 Lloyd George, David, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, Ivor Nicholson and Watson, Vol. II, 1933, p. 296.

10 Lloyd George, David, War Memoirs, p. 321.

11 Boraston, J.H. (ed.), Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches, Dent, 1979, p. 348.

12 Vagts, A., History of Militarism, Meridian, 1959, p. 234.

13 Cooksley, P., The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One, Tempus, 2006, p. 116.

14War Cabinet Report 1917, London, 1918, p. xiii.

15 Williams, B., Raising and Training the New Armies, Constable, 1918, p. 22.

16War Cabinet Report 1917, p. vii.

17Leeds in the Great War, p. 38.

18 Gladstone, W., Birds in the Great War, p. 71.

1

The British Army

I called upon the energy of the country to supply deficiencies in previous experience and preparation, and set to work to build a series of new armies, complete in all their branches (Kitchener, June 1916).1

The original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fought in the Retreat from Mons in 1914 and then at Ypres. Next came the New Army – Kitchener’s Army – and the 141 days of the Somme battle. Last came the conscript army of 1918 with vastly increased firepower – from fifteen rounds of rifle fire a minute (and no grenades) to a million shells a day.

The Army had shifted deployment in the ten years before the war from the empire to a possible war across the Channel. The effective reforms under War Secretary Edward Cardwell in 1870 had created a linked battalion system so that within each regiment one battalion served at home and one overseas. In practice the understrength home battalion was creating drafts for the priority battalion overseas and the fifteen-year postings of the Cardwell overseas battalions weakened the ties with their home area. Even as late as 1938 the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers (the regiment of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves and in which my father served) was sent to Lucknow for a posting that was expected to last to 1953.

R.B. Haldane, the reforming war minister after 1906, sought a ‘Hegelian’ army, named after the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel, seer of transformation, and transform he did. The British Army of 1910 was totally different from that of 1905. At its core was an expeditionary force of regulars, six divisions each of 12,000 men, which could be brought into line across the Channel in twenty days. For home defence against invasion there were the Territorials, potentially another fourteen divisions, but ones that required further training and armaments. There was one omission in the scheme – a stockpile of rifles, guns and ammunition to bring about this expansion. The scheme created an army with many more men but with quite inadequate armaments, mainly because extra money had to be found for building dreadnought battleships. The Haldane reorganisation had to fund a large expansion with a static budget.

The War Office. A massive building and one of the first in London on concrete caissons.

With new organisation came some new men. Haldane brought in modernisers such as Haig, who were responsible for implementation. The one constant was the regimental system – in fact the new organisation strengthened the local roots by basing the bulk of the army at home. Recruitment was voluntary and the new system provided greater opportunities. The reservation of certain jobs – police and London taxi drivers – for ex-servicemen also helped improve prospects for those who had finished their seven-year enlistment.

The new War Office was opened in 1906, across Whitehall from the Horse Guards, the old headquarters.2 The War Office was a massive trapezium resting on a concrete caisson base 6ft thick and 30ft below road level, in order to stop it from sinking into the Thames mud. The building had an ornately decorated hall with a grand staircase. Along the roof, sculpted figures symbolised peace and war, truth and justice, fame and victory, and on top of each of the four corner towers a decorative dome masked the irregularity of the building’s shape. The lion in the coat of arms over the main entrance has a distinctive snarl.

The Lion Rampant of the War Office.

The reforms in the ten years before 1914 included:

A new General Staff: there were some efficient heads of branches, even though the central leadership remained woefully inadequate until Field Marshal Sir William Robertson took over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in 1915.

A new, clearly written operational guide: ‘Field Service Regulations’ in two volumes.

A balloon corps and then from 1912 the Royal Flying Corps: both within the army. The Royal Air Force followed from 1 April 1918.

The use of heavy tractors for pulling artillery.

The use of telephones to transmit orders.

New emphasis on intensive training symbolised by training for fifteen aimed rounds a minute at Hythe Ranges. Soldiers had to pass this test or leave the army.

Large-scale divisional exercises on Salisbury Plain (newly leased for training) with air observation.

The reorganisation of the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) to focus on prevention and sanitary measures as well as on treatment, following the success of the Japanese medical services in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.

Military activity permeated society. The new Territorials were recruited in the towns, while the old Yeomanry cavalry had been based in the counties controlled by the Lords Lieutenants. The Boy Scouts, with their handsome uniforms, were founded by Boer War hero Baden Powell. The young Clement Attlee drilled the boys in the Haileybury Boys Club and gained early promotion in 1914 as a result.3 By 1914 half a million people were taking part in military activity, 300,000 in the Territorial Army.

From August 1914 Kitchener and the War Office drove through more changes, first with the New Army. Kitchener called for the first 100,000 volunteers. He was one of the few to see the need for an army of 2 million men, which would have to serve abroad in a long war. The Territorials were only pledged to serve at home and it is not clear whether they could have been expanded at the rate required.

Kitchener’s call to arms was more than the one poster – it was a sustained and powerful publicity campaign carried out by the relatively new method of street posters on hoardings. This media campaign used shame (what will your girl think of you?) as well as appeals to patriotism. Over the next two years there were 2 million volunteers.4 The new army was, however, trained by old officers. The ‘dugouts’ who had been retired by the modernisers returned for a time.

Lord Roberts’ Christmas card 1913. There was a move towards greater military activity across society.

Lord Kitchener at the War Office, in his first days as War Minister, with ‘Bob’s your uncle’ Lord Roberts. From The Kitchener Memorial Book.

The Leeds Pals recruiting car – ‘Naw then, John Willis – ger agate lad join t’army’ – on to Berlin.

There were great regional and local differences in recruitment rates. It was more of a tartan army than it statistically should have been; the recruitment rate was much higher in Scotland, and higher in urban than in rural areas.5

Recruitment up to 4 November 1914 per 10,000 population:

Southern Scotland, 237

Midlands, 196

Lancashire, 178

London and the Home Counties, 170

Yorkshire and the North East, 150

Ireland (North and South), 127

West of England, 88

Eastern England, 80

John gets to camp: advance party of the Leeds Pals unloading Quaker Oats at Colsterdale.

A postcard depicting life in camp.

By early 1915 most of the original BEF were casualties and Territorial divisions (inadequately equipped and trained) were drafted in. These just managed to hold the 20-mile front around Ypres up to May 1915, when German attention turned East. The British line was held mainly as result of the Flanders mud, detested but in fact the secret defensive weapon both in containing any advance and limiting the effectiveness of what was, at this point, massive German superiority in artillery. A contemporary, J.F.C. Fuller (later to be one of the best known military writers of the twentieth century), wrote:

These months (the winter of 1914–15) were some of the wettest on record: The British line was waist deep in mud. Yet it was the mud of Flanders which saved this thin line from annihilation in spite of its swearing. Had Flanders been a dry, open plain instead of a swamp, it is not too much to suppose that the war would have been over by the summer of 1915.6

This period saw a great shortage of young officers after the very heavy casualties among battalion commanders in the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, and then among junior officers in the 1915 offensives at Neuve Chapelle and Loos. It was an army with a desperate mission but a shortage of experienced leaders. Later Haig wrote that it had been a near-miracle that the line held in 1915. It was the year that saw the greatest disparity in weaponry and training between the British and German armies.

In 1916 the New Army mounted its 141 days of offensive on the Somme. Then came a new wave of recruits – the conscripts – either older men who had not volunteered or 18-year-olds. The old distinctions between the Territorials and Kitchener’s men were blurred. The conscripts were the first in British history.7

By 1918 the army had completely changed again. This required a massive logistic operation with each mile of front requiring 2,000 tons of supplies per day. It had support in canteens, repair bases, road-mending and many other activities. It was machine war with new sections that had not existed in 1914, such as the Tank Corps, the Machine Gun Corps (170,000 at its peak) and Royal Flying Corps (Royal Air Force from 1 April 1918). Notable too was the Special Brigade, for discharging poison gas via the feared and effective Livens projectors. There was also a whole range of new and improved weapons including Stokes mortars, Lewis guns, the lighter Vickers-Maxim machine gun, tanks and sound-ranging artillery (aided by accurate maps and aerial observation). The 100 days of advance from June to November 1918 was a faster-moving mechanised war, even if slowed by the German use of mustard gas, which was only available to the British from September 1918.

A 1917 48th division Christmas card from Fred, wishing you all ‘a happy Christmas and prosperous New Year’. What happened to Fred?

This was not the old trench warfare in fixed lines. Even in static positions trenches were moved to avoid aerial observation. If the war had continued as expected in 1919 it would have gone underground, as demonstrated by a recently excavated network of deep caverns 40ft below the surface around Ypres. By mid-1918 only 450,000 out of the 1.4 million British troops on the Western Front were front-line infantry. Divisions were reduced from twelve to nine battalions of infantry. The line lengthened – the British Army was, by early 1918, holding 122 miles with this limited number of front-line infantry. The massive artillery and machine-gun presence came to be the primary defence, as it was later for attack.

The new machine war needed much more maintenance and the mechanics needed much more supply. There was even a special workshop to produce rubber stamps – 57,107 of them in 1918.8 All the improved weaponry needed more training, leading to specialist training courses being vastly expanded. Risks, of course, were not equally shared, with heavy casualties among infantry, while 2,592 of the Army Service Corps (314,693 by 1918) were killed in action during the whole war – possibly fewer than would have died in the air pollution and performing the heavy labour of town life in the UK.9 There was also a huge salvage operation of people via rehabilitation of the wounded, and also of materials such as metal and leather. Such salvage of metals was a vital step towards reducing calls on shipping.

Middlesbrough War Memorial has one of the longest lists of names in the UK. (This photograph shows only one half of the memorial.)