The Long Run (5 page)

Darling: How did you know that Blackadder? It’s classified information.

Blackadder: It’s the same plan we used the last time sir.

And the seventeen times before that.

They all move over to the desk.

Melchett: E-e-exactly! And that’s what’s so brilliant about it. It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard. Doing exactly what we’ve done eighteen times before will be the last thing they expect us to do this time. There is, however, one problem.

Blackadder: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds?

Melchett: Exactly. Field Marshal Haig is concerned that this may be depressing the men a tadge, so he’s looking for a way to cheer the men up.

Blackadder: His resignation and suicide seem the obvious answer.
⁷⁴

When the war was over, Newfoundland’s Commission of Government negotiated with over 200 French landowners to purchase and preserve sixteen hectares of land at Beaumont-Hamel. Newfoundland seedlings—including spruce, fir, dogberry, and juniper—were shipped over and planted.
⁷⁵
Visitors arrived to pay their respects almost as soon as the war ended.
⁷⁶

66
Nicholson,
Fighting Newfoundlander
, 232.

67
Nicholson,
Fighting Newfoundlander
, 253-61.

68
Philip Gubbs, “The Historic First of July,” in Neiberg,
Reader
, 185-190.

69
Nicholson,
Fighting Newfoundlander
, 269.

70
Nicholson,
Fighting Newfoundlander
, 270-2.

71
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 6.

72
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, xxxii.

73
Howard,
The First World War
, 65.

74
Todman,
The Great War
, 116;
Blackadder:The Whole Damn Dynasty
, 354.

75
Kevin Major,
No Man’s Land: A Play
, (St. John’s: Pennywell Books, 2005) 10.

76
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, xxxx; Ferguson also notes that, in
Tender is the Night
, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Driver visits the trenches six years after the war. His party was particularly moved by the fate of the Newfoundlanders.

CHAPTER SIX

A
LTHOUGH INVALIDED AWAY
from the Front, and convalescing in Wandsworth in London, Robertson was still not shielded entirely from the remainder of the war. The country now operated under the Defence of the Realm Act. The war would bring rationing and blackouts. The capital cities of Britain, Germany, and France all became settings for the theatre of war. Paris, for example, was bombed in 1914—almost 700,000 civilians left Paris in September of that year
⁷⁷
—and shelled in 1918.
⁷⁸

London in 1914 was a city of youth: “Fully 38 per cent under the age of twenty in 1911.” Most Londoners had been born there, and their sense of identity was forged in their particular and distinct boroughs: Croydon, Islington, Chelsea, Hackney, Greenwich, Lambeth, Kensington, Westminster.
⁷⁹
Together they comprised a major global power in itself, the “financial capital of the world.”
⁸⁰

London appeared to have braced itself for the conflict, even embraced it. For many months before August 1914, the city, and the country, expected war, and their expectations were
often steeped in enthusiasm. This was reflected in, and perhaps partly generated by, the popular fiction of the day (for example, L. James’s
The Boy Galloper
, William Le Queux’s serialized bestseller
The Invasion of 1910
, or Walter Woods’s
The Enemy in Our Midst
).
⁸¹
Conspiracies of German spy rings were a popular motif, although curiously, and presciently, many books did not posit a war with the Germans, but a conflagration ignited by an assassination in the Balkans.
⁸²
Others cast Russia or even France as the more natural British enemy. P.G. Wodehouse went even further (of course) in
The Swoop!, or, How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of Great Invasion
, published in 1909, which saw its hero defend his nation from attack (on the August Bank Holiday, no less) by Germany, Russia, Switzerland, China, Monaco, and Morocco.
⁸³

Such frivolity flirted with being considered anti-militarist, not patriotic. And there were some who did openly express such controversial viewpoints: those who looked back on the Boer Wars (1880-1881, 1889-1902, pitting the United Kingdom against the South African Republic and the Orange State) as disastrous foreign policy; labour organizers who saw only peacetime as potential for radical, trans-national union and work improvements; and those beginning to follow the new philosophy of pacifism. But once war was declared, an author like H.G. Wells was not alone in rushing to demonize the enemy; Wells even had a powerful image ready in his forward-thinking mind, a gigantic lethal machine: unwieldly, unearthly, its twister body with tentacled arms of havoc continuously stoking its maw’s appetite for total war.
⁸⁴

Indeed, the declaration of war was celebrated in the streets all over Britain. (In Germany the pubic fervour was known
as
erhebung
, “exaltation”).
⁸⁵
The British government called for 100,000 volunteers; 750,000 signed up within a month. Conscientious objectors—a new term—were reviled and any seeming able-bodied man not in uniform could be shamed with a white feather or refused service in shops and pubs. This public attitude was somewhat checked by the Battle of the Marne, September 5th to the 12th,1914; although the Germans were defeated while fighting on two fronts, casualties and losses were high all around, and neither side clenched the decisive victory it had felt was within its grasp.
⁸⁶
The Battle of the Marne also drove the anticipated short war into the stalemate of the trenches.

Civilians absorbed these shifts and setbacks, just as they had adjusted to the first huge mobilizations of volunteer soldiers, and then the many of those who were lost or maimed. They were firmly behind the soldiers: what those men suffered, they at home would also bear.
⁸⁷
And the dangers were shared. While the German U-boats, for example, could not physically attack people on land, their strategies produced food shortages, and prices rose.
⁸⁸
And the German Navy conducted coastal raids on Britain, including one against Scarborough, Whitby, and Hartlepool that killed 199 on December 16, 1914. Zeppelin raids began May 31, 1915; fifty more followed.
⁸⁹
Aerial and artillery bombardment would kill over 1,000 civilians in London and Paris, and, before the war ended, 1,500 across Britain.
⁹⁰

An eyewitness described an air raid on London on 13 June 1917, originally planned for twenty German aircraft:

But two turned back with engine trouble and a third did so after dropping its bombs on Margate…Three more broke away once over the English coast…The remaining 14, flying in a rough diamond formation, appeared at about 15,000 feet over London at about 1130 hours in bright sunshine.

Many people on the ground assumed they were British aircraft and took no cover. The attack was centred on Liverpool Street Station. An American journalist [Ian Castle] on a bus noted that ‘men and women strangely stood still, gazing up into the air. The conductor mounted the stairs to suggest that outside passengers should seek safety inside. Some of them did so. ‘I’m not a religious man,’ remarked the conductor, ‘but what I say is, we are all in God’s hands and if we are going to die we may as well die quiet.’ But some inside passengers were determined that if they had to die quiet they might as well see something first and they climbed on top and with wonderstruck eyes watched the amazing drama of the skies.
⁹¹

Civilians were also killed in ammunition factory accidents. The worst was an explosion in Silverton, in London’s East End, January 19, 1917, with sixty-nine dead and over 400 injured.
⁹²

As the fighting continued, civilians learned their war news through the press (and both British and French newspapers were fined and suspended for reporting such stories as the unhygienic conditions of transports of wounded soldiers. It was not just military news that could get them into trouble either, but also political thought deemed counterproductive to the war effort).
⁹³
Letters from the front could also be
censored, often by the soldiers themselves, not wanting to distress their friends and family. Trainloads of wounded soldiers were timed to arrive late at night, out of public sight and acknowledgement. But there was no hiding that there was much to fear and mourn. The home front had its own terrible terrors and attritions. As one English woman, Vera Brittain, wrote to her fiancé, Roland Leighton,

Oxford 7 May 1915

It is horrible to think of you under shell fire, & in support trenches. I suppose you really are very near the vast chaos that was Ypres—if not actually in it. I wonder, if all this ever ends—sometimes I feel as if nothing but the end of the world could finish it—& you are still left to us, if you will be very different. I supposed you are bound to be—people, especially those who[se] sensibilities are fine and keen, can’t go through this sort of thing & remain the same.
⁹⁴

But Leighton was not left to them. He died December 23, 1915, just as he was expected home for Christmas,
⁹⁵
and Vera would later write her brother Edward:

1st London General, 28 June 1916

I believe I heard the guns here a day or two ago. What a clamour must be going on! One anxiety is more than enough; & sometimes I feel quite glad that Roland is lying where the guns cannot disturb Him however loudly they are & He cannot any more hear the noise they make.
⁹⁶

Edward, too, would fall. The personal cost paid by many British families and individuals was very high. 1916 was a particularly terrible year; even income tax was raised, to twenty-five percent. At the same time, German civilians suffered as much or more. Not just in terms of casualties and shortages and rationing, but even in wage losses, as capital income dropped twenty-four percent, even as it rose in Britain.
⁹⁷

So even a soldier such as Robertson, rescued from the battlefield and convalescing in England, on the home front, would not have been immune to the culture shock and collateral damage of all-out war.

77
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 186.

78
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 113.

79
Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert eds,
Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 30.

80
Ibid., 32.

81
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 1-2.

82
Ibid., 4.-5

83
Ibid., 6.

84
Ibid., 233.

85
Ibid., 175.

86
Chris Trueman, “The Home Front 1914 to 1918,”
The History Learning Site
, online, accessed July 2014.

87
Winter and Robert eds,
Capital Cities
, 14.

88
Trueman, “The Home Front.”

89
Ibid.

90
Ibid.

91
Beckett,
The Making of the First World War
, 170-1.

92
Trueman, “The Home Front.”

93
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 220-221.

94
Vera Brittain, “Letters from a Lost Generation,” in Neiberg,
Reader
, 233.

95
Brittain, “Return of a Dead Officer’s Kit,”
The Guardian
, online, last updated 14 November 2008.

96
Brittain, “Letters,” 238. Vera Brittain (1893-1970) volunteered as a VAD during WWI and was later a writer best known for her memoir
Testament of Youth
(1930). Besides Roland and Edward, she also lost two very good friends during the war.