Victoria's Cross (17 page)

The ruling against posthumous gallantry awards (other than the VC or MiD) was debated on 8 March 1916 in the House of Lords. Lord Sydenham,
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a Liberal and a former lieutenant general with the Royal Engineers who had served in the Sudan expedition under Kitchener, highlighted the anomaly:

[I]t cannot be said, when one order is posthumous, that the concession may not be conceded of other orders . . . in the allocation of orders for gallant action it is very difficult to say exactly where the line of the Victoria Cross comes and that of the next lower decoration. It is a question that cannot be decided with absolute certainty.

More precisely, the ‘system' was a cracked veneer overlaying confusion and muddle, not simply with the VC but with the whole gamut of military decorations. Lord Sandhurst, Under-Secretary of State at the War Office, responded to Sydenham for the government with unhelpful sympathy, pointing out that families of dead VC winners would be sent the Cross, while in the case of the CB, CMG, DSO and MC, the insignia might be sent to the next of kin, so long as the man who gained the distinction survived long enough for it to have been gazetted. A posthumous VC might not be in strict accordance with the extant VC warrant but could nevertheless be given; a posthumous MC could not. Sandhurst said this was regrettable, but all he could offer was a promise that the ‘whole matter will be dealt with at the termination of the war'. The government blocked posthumous decorations other than
the VC because of the old anxiety – to permit them might mean a flood of retrospective demands. As Sandhurst put it: ‘the selection of names is always a very difficult matter in the case of posthumous honours. Whatever system was adopted . . . it would be very difficult to satisfy every claim.'
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There the matter rested until the end of the war.

As slaughtered heaps were interred in Flanders, London continued to be inundated with VC recommendations. Sifting the questionable from the deserving was taxing. Some early ones, such as this approved by Sir John French, received short shrift: ‘On 24th August [1914], when retiring he [Lieutenant W. G. R. Elliott of the 1st Cheshire Regiment] ran back, picked up a wounded man, and carried him 100 yards to safety under a hot fire, being himself shot through both ankles.'
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Courageous acts that formerly might have gained the VC were, if not ten a penny, certainly in far greater numbers than ever before, and many went unnoticed; indeed, the brave sometimes had to make do with compensations other than medals.

Frank Richards served as a private in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, throughout the war. In his memoir
Old Soldiers Never Die
,
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Richards tells of ‘Broncho', an incorrigible troublemaker when out of the front line but ‘a grand front-line soldier, and most of his crimes were caused by overbearing non-commissioned officers'. In trouble once more, Broncho redeemed himself by volunteering to carry a message to Battalion HQ, through an intense artillery barrage. ‘I'll take the bloody message,' shouted Broncho, even though it ‘was a hundred to one he would be blown to bits before he had gone sixty yards'. Broncho not only carried the message – he returned with an answer. The previous week he had carried to safety a man who was wounded during a night patrol: ‘For these two acts [Broncho] had a term of imprisonment washed out and about six months accumulated Number Ones; but he got no decoration.'
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Max Plowman had started out the war as a member of a Territorial
Army Field Ambulance unit and later became a commissioned officer before finally turning conscientious objector early in 1918. In his memoir, Plowman recalled a ‘remarkable soldier' called Side, a rag-picker in civilian life and a stretcher-bearer at the Somme:

on the 1st of July he carried stretchers under fire continuously for twenty-four hours. Anyone who knows the weight of a loaded stretcher and remembers the heat, the condition of the ground, and what the firing was like upon that day, will agree with me that the Victoria Cross would have expressed rather less than Side's deserts. However, he for his bravery was promoted to full corporal in the fighting-ranks.
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But before new medals could be invented there was ready to hand another way of cutting the number of VC claims: change what was demanded. That had already happened to some extent, by making a posthumous Cross possible; death in the performance of conspicuous gallantry surreptitiously served to exclude conspicuous gallantry that did not quite result in death. In December 1914 General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the 1st Division in Flanders, met King George V, in the course of which they discussed the VC. The king admired Haig's professionalism and had sanctioned his appointment as commander of the Aldershot garrison. Although both were taciturn, emotionally buttoned-up and highly conscious of status, Haig and the king were friends and had developed a mutual respect since they first met in 1898. According to Haig, the king thought a VC for rescuing a fallen comrade ‘was justified and beneficial. I replied that each case must be judged on its merits but, as a rule in
civilised
war such efforts did the wounded man harm and also tended to increase loss of valuable lives.'
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Superficially this appears callous, but Haig was merely espousing the conventional notion of what a ‘civilised' war constituted. His mentor during the Sudan campaign (and later), Horatio Kitchener, had the same view of a VC for rescuing the wounded: ‘I think that some
steps should be taken to discourage recommendations for the Victoria Cross in civilised warfare in cases of mere bringing in of wounded and dismounted men.'
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For Haig and his contemporaries, civilized war was played according to clear, mutually understood rules; both sides showed mercy to a wounded and militarily uniformed enemy. An ‘uncivilized' war had no such rule; a British soldier who fell into the hands of Sudanese Dervishes, mutinous Indian sepoys, Afghan tribesmen or Zulu warriors could usually expect torture and humiliation before a terrible death. British soldiers sometimes took no prisoners in colonial wars, but did not as a matter of course indulge in torture before the killing. In reality, there was a degree of hypocrisy in Haig's position. In the South African war he had seen nothing wrong in spearing fleeing and unarmed Boers with his cavalryman's lance, although he may have justified that butchery because the Boers were, in his eyes, renegades and not professional soldiers;
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but Haig assumed that in a white man's war both sides would desist from torturing and then killing wounded prisoners.
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It would be wrong to say that in such a casual way Haig changed the course of the VC's history; after all, he wanted each case ‘to be judged on its merits' and in conversation with the king suggested that rescuing fellow soldiers from a burning building would certainly merit consideration for a VC. In any case, no formal changes were made to the VC's warrant during the 1914–18 war.

When Haig succeeded French as the BEF's commander-in-chief on 15 December 1915, he stuck to his word regarding the VC recommendations he sanctioned – each case was judged on its merits. This meant that quite a few ‘rescue' VCs got through, particularly if they suited wider considerations, such as deflecting uncomfortable attention from British military disaster. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed, temporary Lieutenant Geoffrey St George Shillington Cather,
adjutant of the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, gained his VC ‘for the most conspicuous bravery' (the conventional opening phrase used in First War VC citations) during the attack at Beaumont Hamel.
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The 9th Battalion went over the top at 7.10 a.m., immediately coming under intense machine-gun fire; the bodies soon piled up. Twelve hours later Cather was the only surviving officer of the battalion. Between 7 p.m. and midnight Cather was out in No Man's Land with other volunteers, searching for wounded survivors and recovering three. Next morning Cather continued the search, rescuing another man, giving water to others and arranging for them to be collected later, all the while under direct machine-gun and intermittent artillery fire. Cather was killed mid-morning.
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He showed considerable courage and selfless dedication, but his VC was of the type that Haig had apparently ruled out in December 1914. But in the days that followed the start of the Battle of the Somme, Haig needed all the ‘good' publicity that could be mustered; in the absence of obvious battlefield victory, dead heroes were the best available means of garnering the sympathy of a critical press and a bewildered and appalled general public.

As the VC had grown in status and acquired greater mystique – despite the many anomalies of the nineteenth century – the establishment took care to limit, as much as possible, the number awarded. This happened in two ways. The adjudication process implemented by the hierarchy of committees raised the minimum bar for consideration for a VC, without public acknowledgement. Simultaneously, a multiplicity of alternative gallantry awards, which attempted to grade more finely the distinctions between supposed ‘levels' of courage displayed, were introduced. In December 1914 the Military Cross was instituted, specifically for warrant officers (sergeant majors) and junior officers (captain and below), who were, because of their rank, ineligible for the Distinguished Service Order, of which almost 9,000 were distributed during the First World War. By the end of the war, many MC citations,
published in the
London Gazette
, spoke of the kind of gallantry that in a previous era might have gained a VC. An example is the 1918 citation for Acting Major Norman Fielden Dare, of the Royal Field Artillery, for a second MC bar:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. This officer was in command of a battery when it was rushed by an overpowering number of the enemy. His judgment and coolness enabled him to extricate four of his guns, which he brought later into action in a forward position, from which, though much exposed, he directed their fire himself, inflicting severe casualties on the enemy and breaking up their attack.
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The partial rescue of previously deserted guns at Colenso in 1899 – an inglorious moment in British military history – had seen six Crosses awarded. Standards had clearly changed: more than 37,000 MCs were awarded during the First War, with almost 3,000 bars.
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Sir Frederick Ponsonby, successively private secretary to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and now King George V, witnessed the haphazard birth of the MC, as his role included the supervision of what he called the whole ‘tiresome question' of decorations. A Conservative to his marrow, Ponsonby had long fought a rearguard action to prevent British honours from being cast away like birdseed on the deserving and the undeserving alike, as had happened with decorations in Germany, France, Italy and Russia. He regarded it as his duty to defend what already existed, not to create something new and possibly superfluous, such as the MC, but the pressure to reward courage on a vastly enlarged scale weakened even his resolve. If there was resistance to giving out VCs with the relative abandon of the nineteenth century, then clearly the bravery of some officers, particularly the junior ones who would bear the brunt of the fighting, was going to go unrecognized. Ponsonby summed up the position:

It had been for some time abundantly clear that our existing decorations were inadequate for a war of this magnitude, and that some decoration other than the V.C. and D.S.O. would be necessary for officers. There appeared to be some dissatisfaction at the front, and while, of course, the whole standard [for the VC] had been raised, there seemed no rewards for junior officers whose bravery did not entitle them to the V.C. The D.S.O. was originally designed for this purpose, but eventually it was restricted to senior officers; during the South African War, too, it had been prostituted, as several officers who had never left the base received it.
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The logical course would have been to broaden the scope of the DSO to include junior officers, but that would have faced stiff resistance from senior officers – many of whom had the DSO – who wished to preserve the distinctive status of the decoration; it was an order, after all, no mere medal. This snobbery helped produce a confusing panoply of military decorations, only partially tidied up in the 1993 review of gallantry awards.

In the discussions between George V and the military establishment on how best to solve the medal ‘gap' at the end of 1914, the king suggested extending the Distinguished Service Cross, an award limited to the Royal Navy, to the army.
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Kitchener jumped at the idea, but the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill – his bitter encounters with Kitchener in South Africa an enduring memory – strenuously defended the exclusivity of the DSC for the Royal Navy. The king was ‘very much opposed to the idea of the two Services having different decorations', but Kitchener, thus rebuffed, furiously refused to have anything more to do with the DSC idea. Instead he opted for a new, army-only cross and formed a committee to work out the details, which was done in such haste that Ponsonby was surprised ‘that more mistakes were not made'. Ponsonby wanted the new army decoration to be for
fighting officers only; staff officers, far from the front lines, would be excluded. Kitchener disagreed, reasoning that ‘a staff officer in charge of intricate operations during an offensive deserved greater recognition than a man who performed an individual act of gallantry. One man was merely responsible for his life, whereas the other might be responsible for thousands of lives . . .'
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Thus tension that had existed since the first days of the VC – between a desire to recognize individual acts of tactical gallantry and the need to reward strategically significant military planning – resurfaced once more. Kitchener chaired the small committee formed to produce the MC, on which Ponsonby, now Keeper of the Privy Purse after having served briefly with the 7th Division in France, also sat. The disorderly process by which the MC was created greatly contrasts with the deliberate planning that went into the VC. The MC was entirely Kitchener's handiwork: