The Shadow of War (47 page)

Having been turned in, Highgate was tried by a court martial for desertion. The trial, presided over by three officers, was brief. Highgate did not speak and was not represented. He was found guilty. At 6.20 on the morning of 8 September, Highgate was informed that he would be executed. The execution was carried out fifty minutes later – at 7.07 – by firing squad. Highgate's name is shown on the British memorial to the missing at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the south bank of the River Marne. The memorial features the names of over 3,000 British soldiers with no known grave.

HMS
Inflexible
was an
Invincible-
class battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, built in 1907. She and her sister ship
Invincible
sank the German armoured cruisers SMS
Scharnhorst
and SMS
Gneisenau
during the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

Jack tar (also Jacktar, Jack-tar or even Tar) was a common term originally used to refer to seamen of the Merchant or Royal Navy,
particularly during the period of the British Empire. Members of the public, and also seafarers themselves, made use of the name in identifying those who went to sea. It was not used as an offensive term and sailors were happy to use the term to label themselves. Its etymology is not certain, but there are several plausible possibilities: before the invention of waterproof fabrics, seamen were known to ‘tar' their clothes before departing on voyages, in order to make them waterproof; it was common among seamen to plait their long hair into a ponytail and smear it with high-grade tar to prevent it getting caught in the ship's equipment; in the age of wooden sailing vessels, ropes and cables were soaked in tar to prevent them rotting in a damp environment.

Members of the landed nobility in Prussia. They owned great estates that were maintained and worked by peasants with few rights. After 1871 they were the dominant force in German military, political and diplomatic leadership. The most famous Junker was Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Junker is derived from Middle High German ‘Juncherre', meaning ‘young nobleman', or ‘young lord'. Many Junkers took up careers as soldiers, mercenaries and officials. Being the bulwark of the ruling House of Hohenzollern, the Junkers controlled the Prussian Army and their influence was widespread in the north-eastern half of Germany: Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, West Prussia, East Prussia and Posen.

An ancient Pennine folk game, akin to the southern English games of trap-ball and probably an ancestor of golf. Often associated with gambling, it was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the fields around moorland pubs. The object is to hit a ‘potty' (knur), sometimes a small piece of heartwood or a small pottery ball, as far as possible with a long flexible
club. The longest hit takes the prize. Distances of several hundred yards could be achieved. The game and its name are thought to be Norse in origin.

A receptacle for collecting human urine. Fermented human urine (lant) was used for various purposes from as early as Roman times. The Romans used it as a cleaning agent for stained clothes and even as a whitener for teeth. The emperor Nero imposed a highly lucrative tax on the urine industry. In nineteenth-century Lancashire, lant was used in the tanning and woollen industries as a cleanser for the removal of natural oils in the production of leather and wool.

The Battle of Le Cateau was fought on 26 August 1914. British General Horace Smith-Dorrien took a calculated gamble during the retreat from Mons, which was against direct orders. Feeling his men were in disarray in a retreat hindered by thousands of French civilians, he decided to fight: 40,000 British troops formed a defensive line just south of the Cambrai–Le Cateau road and just west of Le Cateau itself. Britain suffered many more casualties than at Mons – 7,812 – in a ferocious and hard-fought encounter. It also lost 38 artillery pieces. German losses were much higher, perhaps as many as 20,000. However, Smith-Dorrien's decision meant that the rest of the retreat from Mons could be undertaken with much less arduous harassment and could well have saved a greater part of the BEF from destruction.

The Lee-Enfield
rifle was the main infantry weapon used by the military forces of the British Army from the early twentieth century until 1957.

The Lee-Metford was a bolt-action British Army service rifle, combining James Paris Lee's rear-locking bolt system and ten-round magazine with a seven-groove rifled barrel designed by William Ellis Metford. It replaced the Martini-Henry rifle in 1888, following nine years of development and trials, but remained in service for only a short time until replaced by the similar Lee-Enfield in 1913.

British explosive shells filled with Lyddite were the first British generation of modern ‘high explosive' shells. Lyddite is picric acid fused at 280°F and allowed to solidify. The shells detonated and fragmented into small pieces in all directions, with no incendiary effect. For maximum destructive effect the explosion needed to be delayed until the shell had penetrated its target.

These were just two of the many manufacturers of Great War army rations. Maconochie's, an Irish stew produced in Fraserburgh and Stornoway in Scotland, was the most popular. Soldiers got a weekly ration of 12ozs of dried ‘bully' beef, 1lb 4ozs of bread or flour, 4ozs of bacon, 3ozs of cheese plus sugar, tea, jam, salt, pepper and mustard when available. As in the navy, a ‘tot' (half a gill/70mls) of rum was issued daily; double before a battle. Ten thousand copies of the
Daily Mail
were also sent to the Front every day.

This was a pre-Great War term used by British Army riflemen during training at the Hythe School of Musketry to describe scoring a minimum of 15 hits on to a 12-inch round target at 300 yards
within one minute using a bolt-action rifle (usually a Lee-Enfield or Lee-Metford rifle). It was not uncommon during the Great War for riflemen to exceed this score. Many could average 30 plus shots; the record, set in 1914 by Serjeant Instructor Alfred Snoxhall, was 38 hits. During the Battle of Mons, there were numerous German accounts of coming up against what they believed was machine-gun fire when in fact it was squads of riflemen firing at this rate.

The Battle of the Marne was fought between 5 and 12 September 1914. It resulted in an Allied victory against the German Army. The battle effectively ended the month-long German offensive that opened the war and had reached the outskirts of Paris. The counter-attack of six French field armies and one British army along the Marne River forced the German Imperial Army to abandon its push on Paris and retreat north-east, setting the stage for four years of trench warfare on the Western Front. The Battle of the Marne was an immense strategic victory for the Allies, wrecking Germany's bid for a swift victory over France and forcing it into a protracted two-front war. The Allied armies were over a million strong and faced a German force of over a million and a half.

Allied casualties were over 263,000, of whom more than 81,000 died. German losses were at least 220,000 dead or missing.

The use of Parisian taxis was the idea of General Gallieni, the military governor of the city. On the evening of 6 September 1914, he requisitioned 1,200 taxis to assemble in the Esplanade des Invalides at 19.00 hours; for the next seven hours they ferried men from their positions on the outskirts of Paris to the front line at Nanteuil (four in the seats, one in the luggage compartment). In
all, almost an entire division of 12,000 men was transported. The French Treasury paid the fares according to the standard rate per metre travelled. In all, the bill came to 70,102 French francs (approximately £140,000 today). Taxis were used for the rest of the campaign and became part of French military folklore.

The code of traditional rules in the sport of boxing is named after John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who publicly endorsed the code. The Queensberry rules were the first to require the use of gloves in boxing. In popular culture the term is sometimes used to refer to a sense of sportsmanship and fair play. The rules were written by John Graham Chambers, a Welshman, and drafted in London in 1865, before being published in 1867. The Marquess of Queensberry's third son was Lord Alfred ‘Bosie' Douglas, the close friend and lover of Oscar Wilde.

The MG 08 was the German Army's standard-issue machine gun in the Great War, an adaptation of Hiram S. Maxim's original 1884 Maxim gun. It could reach a firing rate of up to 400 rounds per minute using 250-round fabric belts of 7.92 x 57mm ammunition, although sustained firing would lead to overheating; it was water-cooled using a jacket around the barrel that held approximately one gallon of water. Using a separate attachment sight with range calculator for indirect fire, the MG 08 could be operated from cover. Additional telescopic sights were also developed and used in quantity during the war.

The Maxim machine gun was adopted by the British Army in 1889. In 1912, the army turned to the Vickers gun (see entry
below) and then, in 1915, to the lighter Lewis gun (which could be made much more quickly than the Vickers and, although too heavy for efficient portable use, became the standard support weapon for the British infantry).

A blue-dyed version of melton cloth, a heavy, smooth woollen fabric with a short nap, particularly used for army uniforms and overcoats. Its name comes from Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, the traditional centre for its production.

The Battle of Mons began on the morning of 23 August 1914 with a heavy German artillery barrage. The men of the British Expeditionary Force, many of whom had only just arrived at the battlefield, were exhausted. They were carrying 80lb packs; many had new boots and were walking on cobbled roads. Nevertheless, they formed up along the Canal du Centre, west and north of Mons, in a defensive position nine miles long. Nine and a half British battalions (10,000 men) held four German divisions (70,000) for most of the day.

The Germans attacked in large numbers, but in close formation, suffering significant casualties from extremely accurate British infantry marksmen. However, by midday large numbers of Germans had crossed the canal and some British units began to fall back. The tactical withdrawal lasted until dusk, but the Germans did not follow in hot pursuit; they had suffered unexpectedly high casualty figures and called a ceasefire to lick their wounds.

British losses on the day were 1,642 killed, wounded and missing. They included 400 from the 4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment and 300 from the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment. German losses were at least 6,000, but could have been as many as 10,000.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany reportedly issued an order on 19 August 1914 to ‘exterminate … the treacherous English and walk over General French's contemptible little army'. Thus, the regular soldiers of Britain's standing army of 1914, who went to France as the British Expeditionary Force, became known as ‘The Old Contemptibles'. However, no concrete evidence has ever been found to suggest that such an order was issued by the Kaiser. It was likely to have been a British propaganda invention, one that has since become accepted as fact and made legend.

During the Great War, the Imperial government renamed St Petersburg ‘Petrograd', meaning ‘Peter's City', to remove the German words
Sankt
and
Burg
. (In 1924, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the city was renamed Leningrad; the city became St Petersburg again in 1991, following the end of communist rule.)

Champagne Pol Roger, founded in 1849, is a notable producer of champagne. The brand is still owned and run by the descendants of Pol Roger. Based around the town of Épernay in the Champagne region, Pol Roger was the favourite champagne of Winston Churchill. After Churchill's death in 1965, Pol Roger placed a black border around the labels of Brut NV shipped to the United Kingdom.

A hairstyle named after Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), mistress of King Louis XV. Although there are numerous variations of the style for both women and men, the basic concept is hair swept upwards from the face and worn high over the forehead
(and sometimes upswept around the sides and back as well). After its initial popularity among fashionable women in the eighteenth century, the style was revived as part of the Gibson Girl look in the 1890s and continued to be in vogue until the Great War.

Primitive Methodism was a major movement in English Methodism from about 1810 until the Methodist Union in 1932. The Primitive Methodists were a major offshoot of the principal stream of Methodism – the Wesleyan Methodists – founded by a Methodist preacher called Hugh Bourne. ‘Primitive' was used to clarify their belief that they were the true guardians of the original, or primitive, form of Methodism preached by John Wesley.

A puttee (also spelled ‘puttie', adapted from the Hindi
patti
) is a bandage for covering the lower part of the leg from the ankle to the knee. It consists of a long narrow piece of cloth wound tightly and spirally around the leg, and serving to provide both support and protection. It was worn by both mounted and dismounted soldiers, generally taking the place of the leather or cloth gaiter. The puttee was first adopted as part of the service uniform of foot and mounted soldiers serving in British India during the second half of the nineteenth century. In its original form, the puttee comprised long strips of cloth worn as a tribal legging in the Himalayas. Puttees were in general use by the British Army as part of the khaki service uniform worn during the Great War.