The Long Run (3 page)

In the same way, any handful of Newfoundland Regiment
recruits could include bookkeepers, boilermakers, clerks, a chauffeur, bakers, coopers, sailmakers, and a salesman from the dry goods department of a Water Street shop.
²¹

The start of the war was a time when groups of friends from sports teams or outdoor-enthusiast leagues or culture or business clubs enlisted together. These were known as the Pals Regiments or Pals Brigades.
²²
Britain (like Newfoundland) had had no pre-war conscription, and a recruitment process that allowed men to join together with their friends, colleagues, and neighbours was very successful. Unfortunately, it would soon mean they died together, too, and some businesses and villages (and families and outports) would lose a whole generation of young men.
²³

In Germany, since 1871, every male between seventeen and forty-five was liable for military service. During peacetimes, the only requirement was registration. In more tumultuous periods, men were mustered and delegated for five years of service: three in the cavalry (few in the aristocratic command structure throughout the European armies strategized much beyond cavalry)
²⁴
and two in other branches. Only those in prison were exempt. Germans who passed the required physicals and were deemed ready to fight were rated KV—
kriegsdienst verwendungsfahig
, fit for active service.
²⁵

On August 22, an enlistment proclamation appeared in the Newfoundland papers. Men between nineteen and thirty-five were sought to “serve abroad for the duration of the war, but not exceeding one year”: privates would be paid $1.00 a day plus rations. There was a rush to become part of the great adventure before it was all over. As even the Kaiser
told his troops, nobody expected the war to last until Christmas.
²⁶

That evening, the recruitment centre was opened in St. John’s. On the first night, seventy-four men enlisted; within its first week, 275; in two weeks, 743, Robertson among them.

A training camp opened in Pleasantville. Government, businesses, and private citizens donated tents, and others were made from the sails of vessels in the harbour.

On October 3, the First Five Hundred, the Blue Puttees, which included Robertson, assigned to “A” Company of the 1st Battalion, marched from Pleasantville to the S.S.
Florizel
, a steamship sealer converted to troopship. They were cheered by a huge group of citizens.
²⁷
“Red, white, and blue bunting draped many of the buildings and fluttered from the masts of ships anchored at the harbor. All business was suspended. Shortly before four o’clock, the Newfoundlanders fell in.”
²⁸

Their first night aboard was actually spent in St. John’s harbour. They were waiting to join a Canadian convoy for their Atlantic crossing. The next day, they sailed.

From the beginning, the Newfoundland Regiment enjoyed remarkable cohesion: “The Newfoundland Contingent possessed a unity which was without parallel. Probably at no time in history had so many men been recruited into a formed body of troops from such a relatively small area in so short a time, all sailing together and embarking from their own home port.”
²⁹

On board, their training consisted of Company commanders
lecturing their men for an hour each afternoon. There were religious services on the Sunday. One evening a concert was organized by Colour Sergeant Owen Steele, and a double quartette sang “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.”
³⁰

The
Florizel
docked in Plymouth Sound, a bay in the English West Country, on October 14, the Newfoundland soldiers staying aboard until the 20th.

17
Barb Sweet, “Service Monday will remember the arrival of 1914 war telegram,”
The Telegram
(August 2, 2014) A9.

18
The Rooms, “Entering the Great War,”
The Newfoundland Regiment and the Great War
, online, accessed June 2015.

19
W. David Parsons, “The Importance of Beaumont-Hamel,” unpublished paper, submitted to the Centre for Newfoundland Archives, QE II Library, Memorial University, 2014.

20
Todman,
The Great War
, xi.

21
Major, personal interview.

22
Parsons, “The Importance of Beaumont-Hamel.”

23
Neiberg,
Reader
, 10.

24
Todman,
The Great War
, xi.

25
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, xxxi.

26
Sweet, “Service Monday,” A9.

27
O’Neill,
The Oldest City
, 108.

28
Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson,
The Fighting Newfoundlander: A History of The Royal Newfoundland Regiment
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006), 114.

29
Ibid., 117-18.

30
Ibid., 119-20.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
LYMPICS OR NO
Olympics, athleticism itself was part of the militaristic ethos. In Germany, this philosophy was known as “Sport and Turnen” and was much encouraged by the army, at first in enthusiasm for the Olympic preparations, but continuing even as plans for the 1916 Olympics were shelved. Olympic idealism dovetailed with a search for a better way of training soldiers, and more efficient rehabilitation of their injuries.
³¹

Even during the hostilities, sport continued as a regular part of life. Although in 1915 British competitive football was suspended for the duration, the soldiers played soccer from their trenches. It was a vital pastime, and taken quite seriously. Over 2,000 footballers had enlisted, sometimes as whole sides, and the numbers were enough to constitute special Football Battalions.
³²
Leagues formed and competitions were held.
³³

Perhaps the most famous games were those of the 1914 Christmas truce, when soldiers of the British and German
trenches on the Western Front initiated an unofficial ceasefire that progressed from shaking hands, singing Christmas carols, and allowing time for religious services and burials, to exchanging gifts of chocolate, cigarettes, and schnapps—and playing football. In their letters home, soldiers described the events (which also included trading souvenirs and impromptu hairdressing) as “unique and weird,” “absolutely astounding,” and “marvelous.”
³⁴
(Shorter ad-hoc truces, allowing soldiers on both sides to eat, rescue wounded men, or simply pass a few peaceful hours without the barrage of artillery, were fairly common.
³⁵
And, sometimes, enemy night patrols might take good care not to sight each other.)
³⁶

This was not the only time that sport spanned a gap between the two sides. In the prisoner-of-war camps, the German guards watched with interest as the English and French prisoners played soccer
³⁷
; although, the camps, like everything else, were strained by pre-war thinking that the conflict would be swift and decisive. Even within that pre-supposed timeframe, the Germans were surprised by the numbers of soldiers they captured as the British Expeditionary Force
retreated across the River Marne in late August and early September 1914.

Germany, like Britain and the other nations embroiled in the conflict, wanted to show it was treating its war prisoners well. Of course, the prisoner soldiers were also sources of enemy intelligence and could be used as hostages.
³⁸
But official (and more reassuringly humane) photographs showing, for example, British soldiers giving German captors cigarettes and a drink were widely and officially publicized.
³⁹
It was good propaganda (a term known in French as
bourrage de crane
or skull stuffing).
⁴⁰
Propaganda was not necessarily a negative term at this time: it simply presented information through text and, especially, imagery, often appearing on that democratic form of communication—posters—as something emotional, something positive and evocative without necessarily being absolutely logical.
⁴¹

With the existing facilities overwhelmed even before the war continued past Christmas 1914,
⁴²
more camps needed to be built and organized, and the prisoners delegated for labour in mines or forestry and agriculture or factories. (Regular Sunday football matches would continue to be part of their routine.)

As the war lasted, conditions at the camps, on both sides, could vary from fairly decent to intolerable. Soldiers from every country endured them. Any embroiled nation could reference the signature news photograph of prisoners staring out through barbed wire. It happened to all of them. Indeed they had all of the WWI iconography in common: the
trenches, the gas attacks, the stretcher-bearers foundering through the muck of No Man’s Land.
⁴³
In fact, WWI posters from every nation, whether championing recruitment, war bonds, or sheer patriotism, often featured similar if not identical iconography, especially the hero figure of the lone battle-weary but resolute soldier.
⁴⁴

These symbols also flickered into moving images. The first documentary of WWI—of any war—
The Battle of the Somme
, debuted in Britain on August 21, 1916. Its most famous sequences showed soldiers going over the top. That these were later considered staged, not true, footage, diluted none of their impact. They only reinforced the choreography the public believed the soldiers had followed by their orders and to their death on 1 July 1916.
⁴⁵
(This was the film seen by the widest audience in Britain until
Star Wars
in 1977.)
⁴⁶

These classic examples of WWI propaganda were largely produced outside of official government agencies. Instead, they were filtered through popular culture and especially spooled through cinema (although the British War Office, for one, would sometimes commission a film).
⁴⁷
German film companies, too, shot and screened titles like
How Max Won the Iron Cross
, and
Miss Field-Grey
. These helped fill the
void created by the banning of all foreign films.
⁴⁸
And along with academic manifestos, bellicose poetry, and flag-waving editorials, companies in many nations produced war-inspired toys and comics including tanks, pea-firing artillery, and “In France,
Lusitania
jigsaws and a militarized version of Monopoly.”
⁴⁹

A nation’s mentality was compressed into these cultural touchstones. As mentioned, propaganda was not automatically stamped as negative. It was a discussion between nations, or between a nation and itself, and the values of courage, determination, or heroism were shared by all involved, like the lonely stalwart soldier who was so often the central image on British, French, and German posters.
⁵⁰
Even a soldier who was hurt or injured, bearing a sling, crutch, or bandages, stayed brave and determined. The enemy was neither, and often dehumanized, depicted on German posters, for example, as a dragon, fought and felled by Siegfried.
⁵¹
In the eyes of the Allies, Germany could be distilled into the image of a spiked helmet.
⁵²

Yet, along with this celebration of militarism, these countries also increasingly shared the sense that these soldiers formed a generation being lost in vain. No huge gains were being made by any side. Eventually, The War to End All Wars arguably prevented none, while “The greater destruction of the Second World War contributes to an understandable yet misleading image of the First as a senseless waste, the ultimate expression of a wrong war fought for the wrong reasons.”
⁵³
No one, not even the soldiers, saw the point of it, its genesis lost in a fog of whispers:

Baldrick: I heard it started when some chap called Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry. Blackadder: I think you mean it started when the Arch-Duke of Austro-Hungary got shot. Baldrick: No–there was definitely an ostrich involved. Blackadder: Well, possibly. But the real reason for the whole thing was that it was just too much effort not to have a war.
⁵⁴

In post-war memoirs, both soldiers and politicians often compare the war’s origins and onslaught to natural forces—typhoons, plagues, the irresistible pull of planetary orbits.
⁵⁵
In hindsight, it was viewed as profoundly inevitable. Others later reviewed the military and political planning for conflict and concluded that these policies and preparations constructed such an unwieldly stack they toppled into war on their own.
⁵⁶
But no one could point to a necessary incitement, a worthwhile gain: “The futility of combat in the First World War stands out as perhaps its single most defining characteristic.”
⁵⁷

Analysis of this found myriad contributing factors. The technical problems included fatal weakness in military command and communications. At the outbreak of war the British Expeditionary Force had no effective methods for air observation, aerial photography, or signals communication. They didn’t even have proper maps.