Doyle / Foster Remembering Tommy

The British Soldier in the First World War
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9748-8
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

The British soldier of the Great War has been depicted in many books. Invariably, a pen picture paints him as stoic, joining the army in a wave of patriotic fervour, and destined to serve four years on the Western Front in some of the most costly battles in history. Yet often the picture is difficult to resolve for the reader. What was it like in the trenches? How did the soldier live, where did he sleep? What was it like to go over the top, and when he did, what did he carry with him? For many, the idea of trench life is hazy, and usually involves 'drowning in mud', in, as one writer put it, 'the pitiless misery' of Passchendaele. Recently, military historians have presented an alternative picture, a picture in which the hopelessness of the First World War is given new life and purpose. Remembering Tommy pays tribute to the real life British soldier of the Great War from the moment of joining up to their final homecoming. Using original artefacts in historic settings, the men and their words are brought to life. The uniforms they wore, the equipment they carried, the letters they wrote home, their personal possessions, mementos and photographs come together in a powerful tribute to the indomitable Tommy. Each one of these precious artefacts bears witness to the men who left them behind - allowing us to almost reach out and touch history.

PETER DOYLE specialises in the understanding of military terrain, with special reference to the two world wars. A member of the British Commission of Military History, and co-secretary of the Parliamentary All Party War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group, he is the author of nine works of military history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Doyle, Peter

Foster, Chris

Leseproben

REMEMBERING TOMMY
Tommy Atkins was the name first given to the British soldier by Wellington, but which stuck with him through two world wars. It had common currency on both sides of the line, ‘Tommy’ of the popular press becoming ‘Tommee’ shouted from the German lines. First appearing in official literature in 1815 (when it was used in War Office Orders and Regulations), the name also had a place a century later in the soldier’s pay book of the Great War. Though the British soldier of 1914–18 saw himself as a member of ‘Fred Karno’s Army’, an army of largely amateur soldiers more often than not muddling through the war, it is the name ‘Tommy’ that stuck. This familiar title became much more than a shorthand for the British soldier; it became imbued with concepts of unremitting stoicism, of phlegm and grim humour in the face of the extreme conditions of warfare. In more cynical times, these concepts might be fairly challenged, but the written word of the time, the letters, diaries and memoirs, all attest to its validity. And with the conditions of trench warfare so trying, it is now difficult for us to comprehend how they managed it. With all former combatants of that terrible war now gone, seeking out a means of understanding what it was like to serve requires us to delve into archives, to trawl through letters and diaries, and to listen to the recorded words, fortunately captured by the nation’s museums before it was too late. A soldier’s memories ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ A child’s mementoes of the war And then there are the numerous artefacts, mostly everyday objects that might have been carried in the pack or pocket, or that might have sat on the table, draped an armchair or carried into the frontline. Often these were retained by a soldier because of an association with a time or place – a piece of trench art, a lighter used regularly, a uniform jacket hung in a wardrobe, a pay book kept as evidence of service – or sometimes they were preserved by chance, sat in a drawer or gathered in a forgotten corner. Each one has a hidden story, and each one provides the key to interpreting just a little of what was going on around the men and women of that war. And if each object has a story, then assembling them in context might assist us in our quest to understand just a bit more of what it was like to serve in this most significant period of history. As such, this book is a remembrance of Tommy Atkins, using the objects he might have carried, used and lived with throughout the four years of war. Soldiers are mostly absent from our pictures; the grouping of the artefacts and the situations they are placed in are there to stimulate the mind of the observer. Our focus is both life at home and on the Western Front. Arguably, the Western Front was the most significant theatre of war, as it was here that the principal foe, Germany, would have to be beaten. Though at the time generals and politicians – divided into opposing camps of ‘westerners’ and ‘easterners’ – argued about the wisdom of either committing more men to the fields of northern Europe or opening and sustaining fronts (the so-called ‘sideshows’) in the Middle East and Balkans, it was France and Flanders that saw most of the British soldier. On the Western Front, the British soldier expended prodigious efforts facing a determined enemy – an enemy equally determined to sit on the defensive in positions that represented the westernmost extent of a Greater Germany. Strong, and getting stronger, these entrenched positions were an inevitable consequence of the power of modern warfare, with artillery and the machine gun exacting a terrible price from attacking troops. The term ‘Western Front’ was borrowed from the Germans, who were fighting a war in both the east and west. It was here that a war of position developed in the winter of 1914, when the options for turning the flanks of the German armies advancing across France and Belgium like a ‘swinging door’ had been exhausted. From the moment that trenches had been dug it was inevitable that the war would descend into a war of trench lines and subterranean battles (as it had done in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904). Stretching from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea, these lines were inhabited by Allies from France, the British Empire and Belgium (ultimately joined in 1917–18 by the USA and the Portuguese). Though the British Army would take up a fraction of the whole line, its positions were an essential part of the Allied frontline throughout the war, with an increasing burden of responsibility as the war progressed. In the west, the Allied lines would be stretched in the face of offensives, yet they remained intact until 1918, when first the Germans, and then the Allies, were to break out of their positions, finally resuming open warfare in August 1918. This book, then, takes a journey from the joining of the soldier through his tours of the trenches to his visits home – where domestic life on the home front carried on in the face of growing shortages and the threat of aerial attack. For space, it focuses on the period that encompasses the height of trench warfare, from early 1915 to late 1917, when life for the British soldier was dominated by a cycle of ‘in the line–in reserves–in rest’, each part composed of four to eight days on average. It is the infantryman who appears most in this book, as it was the infantryman who most experienced trench warfare during the war. But we cannot forget the large numbers of men who served the guns, who engineered the battlefield, and who supported the frontline soldiers. As such, the men of the artillery, engineers, Army Service Corps (ASC) and Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) also appear. In illustrating life at the front, we can only hint at the filth and degradation of the trenches, and cannot demonstrate fear, pain and suffering and loss – but the purpose of our book is to capture something of the atmosphere of the period. With objects mute witnesses to the events of wartime, placing them back in to context provides a key, unlocking just a fraction of the past. Our focus is on the routine of daily life; the unremarkable rather than the dramatic. The images allow observers to draw their own conclusions, and to conjure their own memories of family stories, of personal memoirs, of books read. In spirit, Remembering Tommy follows the rhythm illustrated by Pte Fergus Mackain, who, in a series of postcards, gave one of the most accurate depictions of the life of the average Tommy in existence. Fergus Mackain, frontline infantryman and artist, manages to express what was uppermost in the thoughts of many soldiers – home Fergus Mackain illustrates an artilleryman, ‘somewhere in France’ Mackain had a deftness of touch in his charming and understated colour-washed cards. His cards, entitled Sketches of Tommy’s Life, were published in France in four separate series of nine cards each (Imprimérie P. Gaulthier, Boulogne and Visé, Paris). The Sketches themselves fall into four chapters of Tommy’s Life: In Training; At the Base; Up the Line; and Out on Rest. Humorous aspects are present, of course, but underlying the cards is a deep understanding of what it was like to be a soldier on the Western Front. The soldier’s kit is reproduced with minute detail: trench periscopes, bully beef tins, clasp knives, rifle pull-throughs, washing kit holdalls, webbing packs and helmets; these essential yet seemingly mundane items are reproduced in the background of the cards, and reward detailed inspection. Situations are apt, too – the seemingly endless issue of kit items; housey-housey at the base; issue of the rum ration and scanning the sky for trench mortars, whistle in hand in the trenches; ablutions in the reserve trenches – all are handled with an intimate understanding derived from direct experience. This is understandable, after all: 4249 Private Fergus H.E. Mackain served with the 23rd (1st Sportsman’s) Battalion Royal Fusiliers on the Western Front. The Sportsman’s Battalion was raised in the autumn of 1914 by Mrs Cunliffe-Owen, a society lady sufficiently well connected to be able to telegraph Lord Kitchener with the question ‘Will you accept complete battalion of upper and middle class men, physically fit, able to shoot and ride, up to the age of 45?’ She was to receive the answer ‘Lord Kitchener gratefully accepts complete battalion.’ Finally handed over to the army in April 1915, the 23rd Battalion was to serve in the 99th Brigade throughout the war, with 4,987 officers and men serving, and 3,241 as casualties – killed, wounded and missing. Mackain survived the war, serving with the battalion as a private and transferring to the Army Service Corps later in the war – as was usual with men who had suffered wounds and illness. Mackain’s story is not unusual, and his life as a private soldier undistinguished, but his cards are unique not simply because they illustrate the life of the average ‘Tommy’ in extraordinary detail. His cards often have Field Post Office stamps, and messages that draw attention to the similarities between the soldiers depicted on the cards, and the soldier sending the cards home. In this way, Mackain’s cards act as windows on what life must have been like for the average soldier at the front, and are authentic documents of life in the Great War. The British Empire fielded almost 9 million men, serving in all arms during the war. Of these, some 900,000 were killed – 10 per cent of the total – but a further 2 million were wounded, and...