‘Sticking to a Hateful Task’: Resilience,Humour,and British Understandings of Combatant Courage,1914–1918

I. Civilian Understandings of Courage

In February 1913 the British public, and much of the rest of the world, learned of the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions on their return from the South Pole almost a year earlier. As the details of their final days and hours emerged, the dead men were praised, in the most high-flown language, for their courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice. The Englishmen had been beaten in their race to the pole by Roald Amundsen’s arguably more professional party of Norwegian explorers, but the remarkable courage with which they appeared to have met their deaths was in itself a considerable prize. Significantly, admiration for Scott and his team was not confined to the elite sections of British society. They were posthumously lauded as heroes by virtually every newspaper and periodical in Britain, and a curiously diverse range of commentators paid tribute to their bravery and forbearance. Max Jones has demonstrated the extent to which praise for the fallen explorers, and admiration for the values they were thought to represent, crossed class, regional, and gender boundaries within the United Kingdom. Representatives of the different interest groups most often cited for their agitation in British society before 1914 – trade unionists, suffragettes, and Irish nationalists – all echoed the more predictable praise of the mainstream press. ⁸

The dead men were seen as exemplars of courage because they had endured suffering and deprivation in pursuit of a noble objective and, crucially, when fate offered them death instead of glory they faced it with dignity and a sense of willing self-sacrifice. That they had suffered and died was a key part of their story’s appeal to the British public. The manner in which they appeared to have accepted their fates allowed commentators to allude to ancient conceptions of heroism in which courage was closely associated with self-sacrifice and dying well. Journalistic accounts, for example, commonly cast the expedition as a quest, referred to the explorers as knights, and lauded their chivalry. ⁹ The expedition seemed to provide welcome proof that Britain could still produce men of similar courage to that found in classical and medieval literature and, not least, in the figure of Christ himself.

Thus, less than two years before the outbreak of the First World War, there was a good deal of public consensus in Britain on the nature of courage and heroism. A range of disparate commentators, with virtually no common social or political ground, could agree that Scott and his companions were heroes, and that they exemplified an ideal of courage that everyone, irrespective of class, gender, or national divisions, could admire and aspire to.

Wartime portrayals of the British soldier in action tended to draw on such pre-existing motifs and posit a willingness to die, and die well, as the ultimate mark of courage. From the outset, civilian writers, both in the columns of the national press and in numerous popular books on the subject of the war, emphasized the nonchalant equanimity with which ordinary British soldiers confronted the risk of death or mutilation. ¹⁰ That British soldiers consistently behaved with style and ‘dash’ at the front, and were prepared to die if necessary, was a recurring theme in popular wartime writing. ¹¹ The tone of moral righteousness that permeated civilian commentary on the war also meant that the courage of British soldiers was often highlighted by contrasting their exemplary conduct with the perceived cruelty, barbarism, and cowardice of the German enemy. Stories of atrocities committed by German troops advancing through Belgium and France, which were widely reported in the press in the first two months of the war, reinforced the civilian sense that Britain’s role in the conflict was both honourable and just. When British civilians were made the target of German aggression in the airship and U-boat campaigns of 1915, indignation intensified and the demonization of the enemy was reinforced. ¹² The death of British nurse Edith Cavell at the hands of a German firing squad in Brussels in October 1915 offered propagandists in Britain both an inspirational war heroine and yet more proof of enemy cowardice. ¹³ Thus, while there were some dissenting voices, ¹⁴ the generally anti-German climate on the home front meant that the British soldier was often defined by contrast with his adversary. The infantryman, in particular, was understood to epitomize certain national qualities that made him self-evidently better and nobler than his enemy. He was everything the German soldier was not: good-natured, kind, chivalrous, and brave. ¹⁵

Quite apart from aggression against civilians in England or Belgium or on the high seas, German methods of warfare on the battle front itself were also viewed as patently cruel and inhumane. The use of poison gas, flamethrowers, and other innovations provoked a notably strong reaction in the civilian press. ¹⁶ That the British soldier had to confront such an apparently barbaric foe at the front further confirmed his heroic status. Writing in 1917, Frank Fox, the author of several books on the war, applauded British soldiers for the courage with which they bore the ordeal of chemical warfare:

The heroism of the troops who withstood this hideous and unexpected form of warfare can never be sufficiently lauded … With the use by the Germans of poison gas the war took a bitter turn and horror followed horror until the soldier of civilisation had to rise to a height of courage putting altogether in the shade that of the Knights of old, who went out to fight loathly dragons which breathed fire and mephitic vapours. ¹⁷

For Fox and other civilian writers, the British Tommy was a less glamorous but no less heroic figure than the medieval knight.

Christianity provided another major source of inspiration for contemporaries who sought to interpret and represent the soldier’s experience. The Christian ideal of courage, enshrined in the words from the Gospel of St John – ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ – was consistently cited with reference to the British soldier during the war. The words were particularly relevant to those in mourning, and in the years after the Armistice they were inscribed on headstones and memorials with remarkable frequency. ¹⁸ The link between the fallen soldier and Christ was strikingly represented in an illustration that appeared in the Christmas 1914 issue of the Graphic. It features a dead British soldier on a battlefield in a neat uniform and with no obvious wounds other than a tiny bullet hole in his forehead. His rifle and hat lie by his side, and standing above him is the figure of Christ on the cross. The image is captioned ‘Greater love hath no man than this’ and accompanied by a poem that not only draws on Christian imagery but also alludes to the martial heroism of the Middle Ages:

One More unflinching valorous soul hath sped

To that far land whose shadowy paths unfold

Beyond the posterns of the sunset-gold

Beyond the bourn to which our dreams have led

One more true knight …

The Army of the dear triumphant dead …

Mothers and sons … Take hope, and see

In the white book of Chivalry, set apart,

The April glory of the dauntless heart

Who fought and died that Freedom might be free. ¹⁹

The illustration, actually an oil painting by the relatively obscure Durham-born artist James Clark, struck a powerful chord with large sections of the civilian population and was soon ‘hanging in many churches, homes, and hospitals’. ²⁰ The notion that losing one’s life on the battlefield essentially wiped away past sins implied that the war dead were saints or martyrs and was a source of some controversy during the war. ²¹ A diverse range of civilian commentators, including the Bishop of London and the decidedly anticlerical editor of John Bull, Horatio Bottomley, nonetheless endorsed the canonization of front-line soldiers. ²² Writing in 1917, Bottomley insisted that:

Every hero of this war who has fallen on the field of battle has performed an act of Greatest Love, so penetrating and intense in its purifying character that I do not hesitate to express my belief that any and every past sin is automatically wiped from the record of his life. ²³

Thus, as the conflict wore on and the death toll on the various fighting fronts mounted, the themes of chivalrous conduct and willing self-sacrifice, with which Scott and his companions had been so closely identified, became deeply engrained in civilian thinking and writing on the war. Drawing on wartime and post-war memorials designed by civilians, Stefan Goebel has demonstrated the degree to which medieval chivalry ‘dominated British imaginings of the Great War’. ²⁴ Goebel’s research reveals just how closely the Christian theme of self-sacrifice was intertwined with chivalric imagery in such imaginings. ²⁵ In the frighteningly novel circumstances of an industrial war the knights of an imagined medieval past, where chivalry and heroism were synonymous with martial prowess and Christian piety, offered the civilian population a comforting analogy for the khaki warriors at the front.

Importantly, moreover, this Christian knight vision of the British infantryman was combined on the home front with an understanding of the Tommy as fearless and even cheerful in the face of death. As Michael Finn’s research shows, the British local and national press frequently published graphic, uncensored accounts of combat on the Western Front and in the other theatres of war. ²⁶ But this quite realistic reportage was often juxtaposed with colourful references to fearless Tommies spoiling for a fight who simply could not wait to get at the enemy. In an article on the character of the British soldier that appeared in John Bull towards the end of November 1914, the author insisted that ‘Tommy faces death with a calmness, and even a merriment, which astonish friend and foe alike. Being an Anglo-Saxon he regards it as the merest matter of course to risk life and limb whenever his country is threatened.’ ²⁷ Such hyperbole is unsurprising in the pages an overtly nationalistic paper published in the early months of the war. But the image of the British soldier laughing at death persisted. In July 1916 the War Illustrated described the mood of the men of the New Armies on the first day of the Somme offensive: ‘The hour before the advance on July 1^st found British soldiers in high spirits, laughing, joking, confident in a “ready to do or die” humour.’ ²⁸ In August the same paper informed its readers that a sergeant major in a Manchester Pals battalion had been so overjoyed as zero hour approached on 1 July ‘that he actually danced a Highland fling on the parapet of his trench’. ²⁹ Wounded soldiers convalescing in Britain who, owing perhaps to their distance from the front, were often in quite good humour reinforced the popular image of the cheery Tommy. Crucially, moreover, although the nature of the war on the Western Front was occasionally described with more accuracy than post-war commentators remembered, references to the fear felt by combatants under enemy fire were strikingly rare.

II. The View from the Front

Charles McMoran Wilson served as a medical officer with the Royal Fusiliers for over two years on the Western Front. In the midst of the Second World War, now ennobled as Lord Moran and acting as Winston Churchill’s personal physician, he drew on his experience of trench warfare to write The Anatomy of Courage, a flawed but hugely insightful meditation on combatant courage in wartime. He famously contends that courage is like wealth or capital: in wartime a soldier has a certain amount of it in the bank to begin with, but makes withdrawals in combat and other moments of danger. ³⁰ In the attritional trench war that the author knew so well, demands on men’s reserves of courage were made repeatedly over long periods of time and no man could hold out indefinitely. Moran was convinced that virtually all soldiers experienced fear on some level but that the man who could master his fear most efficiently, irrespective of his mental processes, would act courageously. Fear, no doubt, has always gripped soldiers in the heat of battle and has thus been a concern for those who wish to understand the experience of combat. ³¹ The significant advances in weapons technology made in the decades before 1914, however, led to much speculation in military circles as to the potential of ordinary soldiers to withstand the ordeal of combat in a mechanized war.

Writing in 1911, the French staff officer and military strategist Jean Colin identified fear and the mastery of fear in the individual soldier as decisive factors in modern warfare. He agreed with other commentators who argued that the advent of smokeless gunpowder, combined with the increased efficiency and range of small arms and artillery, had fundamentally changed the face of war. Soldiers fighting in future conflicts would be forced to advance over extended, open ground toward a relatively distant, invisible enemy. In such conditions, he argued, attacking a well-defended position would be an acutely terrifying experience for the average infantryman, and conventional frontal assaults would be doomed to failure unless fear could be controlled. Success on the battlefield would belong to the army that recognized and learned to control what he referred to as moral factors. For Colin, ‘the first and unquestionably the most important’ of these factors was fear. ³² He went on to list a number of eminently reasonable ‘remedies for fear’ that officers could employ on the battlefield. As the fear that gripped soldiers while they prepared for combat was inspired not only by the thought that they might be killed but also by a general feeling of uncertainty and apprehension of the unknown, officers should set an example of calm and put men at their ease by treating the engagement with the enemy as if it were ‘something expected and normal’. ³³ In addition, because physical and mental immobility could have a debilitating effect on the individual combatant, it was crucial to keep men active and mobile.

The book in which these observations appeared, Les transformations de guerre, was translated into English in 1912 and disseminated in British military circles. ³⁴ Colin’s work, which drew heavily on the writings of his influential compatriot Charles Ardant du Picq, reveals a remarkably firm grasp on the impact that advances in weapons technology were likely to have on the experience of battle in a future war between European states. What Colin did not anticipate, what he could not have anticipated, was that the war on the Western Front, precisely because of these pre-war advances, would quickly descend into an attritional trench war. Trench warfare was not an entirely new phenomenon in 1914, but it had never been waged on so vast a scale, over such a protracted period of time, and at such immense human and material cost. Although he accurately predicted the preponderance of the defensive, moreover, he did not foresee the degree to which artillery would dominate the battlefield.

In the decades that followed the Armistice, historians and popular authors consistently presented the machine gun as the archetypal battlefield killer, and it is still viewed as an iconic weapon of the war. ³⁵ With its high rate of fire and capacity to cut down whole formations of advancing troops, it was certainly a devastating weapon, yet, as a diverse range of military historians has been at pains to point out, the war on the Western Front was, first and foremost, an artillery war. ³⁶ Artillery shaped the whole character of the war and the nature of combat. The dominance of artillery forced the German and Allied armies to entrench in the autumn of 1914, and a more sophisticated use of field guns and heavy artillery would allow the same armies to break the deadlock of the trench war in the spring and summer of 1918. The overwhelming majority of those killed and injured during the conflict, as much as 60 per cent, had been hit by shellfire. ³⁷ It was thus artillery, not infantry, which acted as the central determinant in the outcome of battles and ultimately led the Allies to victory. ³⁸ If we wish to understand the ways in which front-line soldiers understood courage, we must therefore consider what the experience of front-line service in such a war was like.

With experience, junior officers and men learned to live with the routine short-range shelling that was a staple feature of life in the trenches. Coming under intense, concentrated shellfire, particularly of the sort laid down by large-calibre heavy artillery, was quite a different experience. The personal narratives produced by soldiers during the war bear witness to the abject terror felt by troops forced to withstand heavy artillery bombardment. Writing to his mother during the battle of the Somme, Lieutenant St Helier Evans of the 9th Welch Regiment described the experience of coming under prolonged, heavy shellfire:

[W]e experienced the torments of hell; this is perhaps hell itself purging us if we deserve it for the hereafter. During this excruciating avalanche we crouched or lay flat on the floor of our ditch … Death was not even around the corner, it was staring us in the face, any moment would be the last, one almost wished to be spared further anxiety on this score, let’s be done with it … there was nothing to be done except wait for the next half-minute. ³⁹

Ivar Campbell, an old Etonian who served as a subaltern with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was impressed by the generally cheery demeanour of the men in his command both in and out of the line. When they were being bombarded by heavy artillery, however, he saw a different side to them:

Yet under heavy shell-fire it was curious to look into their eyes – some of them little fellows from shops, civilians before, now and after: you perceived the wide, rather frightened, piteous wonder in their eyes, the patient look turned towards you, not, ‘What the blankety, blankety hell is this?’ but ‘Is this quite fair? We cannot move, we are little animals. Is it quite necessary to make such infernally large explosive shells to kill such infernally small and feeble animals as ourselves?’ ⁴⁰

What Campbell was alluding to was the terrifying sense of disempowerment that men experienced under heavy enemy fire. This feeling of impotence in the face of such fire was a paradigmatic feature of front-line service during the war. As Alexander Watson has observed: ‘Not simply death and discomfort but above all disempowerment made service in the trenches of the Western Front a uniquely frightening, depressing, and stressful experience.’ ⁴¹ Among his ‘remedies for fear’, Colin had suggested that men should be kept mobile in order to counteract the sense of terror and helplessness engendered by powerful enemy fire. Yet men cowering in a trench or shell hole during a bombardment were clearly denied the relief of mobility, and, even in periods of relative quiet, life in the trenches at least during the daytime was characterized by a general lack of movement and activity.

Colin had also advised that when within range of enemy guns soldiers should be allowed to use their weapons as freely as possible. Theoretically, allowing a man to fire his rifle at will gave him the potentially empowering feeling that he was fighting back by returning fire. Again, in the midst of an enemy bombardment this was a ‘remedy’ that was denied to men whose weapons were patently useless in the face of artillery. This was an enemy that the infantryman simply could not fight, his only course of action being to endure the bombardment and hope that his own artillery would retaliate. In another letter to his mother St Helier Evans captured the acute frustration of being unable to respond to enemy fire: ‘we could not hit back – that would have ceased it – we were simply sitting targets waiting for disintegration’. ⁴² Rowland Feilding, an English officer in command of the 6th Connaught Rangers, was similarly struck by the sheer helplessness of infantrymen when confronted with the awesome power of artillery. ‘Through it all, they stand’, he wrote in February 1917, ‘frozen and half-paralyzed by the cold and wet, with no individual power of retaliation beyond the rifle which each man carries, and which is about as much use against the weapons by which he is tormented as a pop-gun.’ ⁴³ His inability to retaliate, combined with the indiscriminate, seemingly capricious nature of the destruction wreaked by artillery, meant that a man’s individual attributes appeared to count for very little in the line. The strongest, fittest, most courageous soldier was just as vulnerable to the threat of death or serious injury as his weakest comrade.

Revisionist historians have rightly pointed out that the experience of trench warfare was not relentlessly grim, that infantrymen spent most of their time in sections of the front that were relatively or completely free from enemy fire, and that boredom was arguably as much of a menace to troop morale as fear. ⁴⁴ When at rest, however, soldiers knew that it was only a matter of time before they returned to the danger, violence, and discomfort of the line. It was thus not simply the experience of coming under enemy fire that tested men’s courage and endurance but the knowledge that this experience would be repeated. Soldiers serving in or near the front line in France or Belgium often lived under the threat of death or serious injury for weeks or months on end, and although the cycle of violence experienced by individual soldiers was punctuated by periods of rest, it was nonetheless a cycle. In Moran’s words, fear under such circumstances was ‘no longer an occasional and exotic visitor but a settler in our midst’. ⁴⁵ In this sense, the war on the Western Front took on the characteristics of siege warfare ⁴⁶ – a siege, moreover, in which personal agency, at least for the infantryman, was reduced almost to nil.

Thus while many officers and men often bore front-line service remarkably well to begin with, and some clearly even enjoyed it, a stage was inevitably reached after an extended period of service when resilience began to wane or broke altogether. In April 1915 Lionel Crouch, a junior officer in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, wrote of his first tour of the trenches: ‘I have never enjoyed myself more than during the last three days. The guns are banging away again and bullets are zipping over our trench all the time … The more I see of this show the more I want to see.’ ⁴⁷ In a letter written to his mother in January 1916 the tone is markedly different:

I … feel so beastly ‘nervy’ now I have taken to ducking at bullets, which I never used to do, and shells make me jump like blazes. We are all getting like that. It is absurd keeping us in the trenches so long – six months continuously now. ⁴⁸

Crouch’s nerve had not broken, and he went on to serve with distinction until he was killed during the Somme offensive the following July, but his ‘capital’ of courage, and that of his comrades, had clearly been depleted.

The sense that they had little control over their own destiny at the front led many soldiers to adopt a fatalistic attitude to life on active service. While the belief that their fates were predetermined, now well documented by historians, was rarely very deep-seated, it nonetheless helped soldiers make sense of the apparent randomness with which artillery shells and other projectiles struck men down. ⁴⁹ Fatalism thus calmed anxiety and enabled soldiers to cope with the often intensely violent world of the front-line. Yet fatalistic attitudes were based on the belief that while a man’s chances of survival might be slim, he nonetheless had some chance. When the sense of having at least this ‘fighting chance’ was removed, nerve could break very quickly.

If artillery fire could greatly reduce a soldier’s sense of personal agency, moreover, poison gas, the advent of which Colin and other pre-war experts did not predict, had the potential to destroy it completely. From a technical and tactical perspective, the opposing armies adapted quite well to chemical warfare, and gas ultimately claimed far fewer lives than either artillery or machine-gun fire. ⁵⁰ The new weapon continued to have a debilitating psychological effect on front-line troops, however, and medical officers in particular testified to the disproportionate and very adverse impact poison gas had on morale. ⁵¹ Charles Cruttwell was serving as a subaltern with the Royal Berkshire Regiment in the trenches south of Ypres in April 1915 when the Germans unleashed chlorine gas for the first time. His remarks on the weapon’s power to extinguish men’s individual feelings of prowess and control are revealing:

In the face of gas, without protection, individuality was annihilated; the soldier in the trench became a mere passive recipient of torture and death. A final stage seemed to be reached in the whole tendency of modern scientific warfare to depress and make of no effect individual bravery, enterprise and skill. Again, nearly every soldier is or becomes a fatalist on active service; it quietens his nerve to believe his chance will be favourable or the reverse. But his fatalism depends on the belief that he has a chance. If the very air which he breathes is poison, his chance is gone: he is merely a destined victim for the slaughter. ⁵²

Cruttwell’s reference to victimhood bears directly on the combatant conception of courage during the First World War. It should be remembered that certain specialists who operated in the front-line, such as machine-gunners, snipers, and trench-mortar operators, killed significant numbers of the enemy during ordinary trench warfare. Aggressive patrolling of no-man’s-land and trench raids, which were carried out increasingly from mid-1915 onwards, also offered men the chance to personally strike back at the enemy. In addition, set-piece battles and offensives often involved a good deal of hand-to-hand fighting and killing. And there is ample evidence that many, if not all, soldiers relished the opportunity to engage with the enemy at close quarters. ⁵³ The fact remains, however, that much of the day-to-day activity of the infantryman in the line was devoted not to killing but to avoiding being killed. In a very real sense, then, the nature of the war on the Western Front tended to reduce the front-line soldier’s status to that of victim, not perpetrator, of violence.

For the officers and men who were familiar with these grim realities of trench warfare, fanciful civilian references to the chivalry, cheeriness, or Christ-like martyrdom of the British soldier could be quite jarring. Infantry officers were sometimes capable of using similar language to civilian authors in their references to the rank-and-file soldiers they commanded, ⁵⁴ and, as Porter and Watson have shown, the ideology of sacrifice remained relevant to combatants, and arguably became more so, as the conflict wore on. ⁵⁵ Yet the apparent romanticization of the war and the men who fought in it on the part of journalists, clergymen, and other civilian commentators frequently provoked the indignation of men who had actually experienced life at the front.

Charles Bernard Mortlock served as a chaplain to an artillery unit in the 37th Division on the Western Front before being invalided home in 1916 with a severe case of trench fever. In a sermon preached at St Margaret’s Church, Oxford, in August 1917 he made an outspoken attack on civilian perceptions of the British soldier in which he railed against the ‘extravagant nonsense’ written and uttered about the war on the home front. The Church Times paraphrased much of what he said:

To read as I did the other day – the writer was probably a woman – of the soldier hero waiting ‘with eager heart and starry eyes’ to go over the top is as sickening as it is silly. Soldiers hate it. They recognize it for the hysterical tosh it is … It is stupid, false, dishonouring and wicked, and I know that many soldiers stay away from church because they are afraid of hearing more of it.

No, the splendour and wonder of our men in France and Belgium, and no praise can possibly be too high, lies not so much in the dash and glory of it all, but in their grimly doing their duty: sticking to a hateful task amid conditions that every right-minded man must hate and loathe with fierce intensity. ⁵⁶

For Mortlock, the average British soldier was a hero not because he fearlessly revelled in the fighting at the front, but because although he hated the trench war, he was nonetheless prepared to endure its horrors. But how widespread was this identification of endurance and ‘sticking to a hateful task’ as the mark of true courage? Would combatant officers and men have agreed with this non-combatant clergyman?

The sheer size of the British army on the Western Front, ⁵⁷ and the regional, class, and cultural diversity of the men who served in its ranks, should dissuade historians from making general statements about combatant mentalities. Certain contemporary sources do, however, give us an insight into the broad ethos of the infantry in the front-line and shed light on the way the mass of junior officers and men understood courage and correct soldierly conduct. The numerous trench journals produced during the war are particularly valuable in this regard. Some of the older, more established units of the British army issued smart, professionally edited quarterly magazines that pre-dated the war and were printed at regimental headquarters in the UK. But from early 1915 a plethora of new journals began appearing that were produced by and for soldiers on active service and were often edited at the front. For the historian, what distinguishes these journals from correspondence, diaries, and other personal narrative sources is that they were produced by serving soldiers for an audience which included significant numbers of civilians but was made up mostly of other serving soldiers. They thus provide us with an insight into the daily preoccupations, self-image, morale, and, crucially, the general culture of the men who served in the front line.

The content of these amateur newspapers varies in tone and while much of it is comic, or at least tongue-in-cheek, they also contain no small amount of quite serious material, including frank allusions to the violence of the front-line, poignant elegies to fallen comrades, and lengthy casualty lists. The presence of ‘high-diction’ poetry that idealizes the self-sacrifice of British troops in a number of the journals supports Porter and Watson’s thesis that sacrificial ideology not only remained relevant to front-line soldiers as the war dragged on but also arguably enhanced their combat motivation. ⁵⁸ Yet frequent bitter criticism of the wartime government and ‘the people at home’, in a similar vein to the article by Strozzi cited above, suggests that soldiers often believed that their understanding of the war, and their role in it, was quite different to that of the home front population. The notion that British soldiers were actually enjoying life at the front seems to have been particularly offensive to combatants and was robustly rejected in the trench journals. As the editor of a one-off magazine produced for the Welsh Division in January 1918 warned civilian readers:

do not … conclude that when a man becomes a soldier he develops into a queer type of being who lusts alternately for battle and for beer … Do not salve your conscience by pretending that he likes it. Nothing is further from the truth – for all that you read in the newspapers. ⁵⁹

This was written during the final winter of the war when the morale of British troops had begun to give the military authorities cause for concern, and the tone is undoubtedly bitter. Yet the same point was made in other journals dating from earlier in the conflict, as in this sarcastic reference to a press report on British soldiers’ enthusiasm for combat, printed in the 5th Glo’ster Gazette during the Somme offensive: ‘The Daily Express of Thursday, August 3^rd, spoke about the men behind the line as “straining at the leash” to go over the top. There have been, we understand, several cases of riot and open mutiny amongst units ordered back to rest.’ ⁶⁰

For the most part, however, the mood of the trench journals is relentlessly humorous and tongue-in-cheek; their pages are filled with mock advertisements, comic sketches, limericks and other nonsense verse, cartoons, and amusing short stories. This is especially true of journals such as The Wipers Times, The 5th Glo’ster Gazette, and The Gasper, which were usually edited at the front. The mordant world-view expressed in this material sheds valuable light on the way front-line soldiers understood their own circumstances, and is arguably more revealing than the more serious content. Martial heroism, for example, where it is depicted, tends to be presented in an irreverent, self-deprecating light, as in this fragment of comic dialogue from the February 1916 issue of The Gasper:

The Offensive

A constant refrain in this more humorous material is that while officers and men do not enjoy life at the front, they are prepared to withstand it and make sacrifices was cheerfully as possible until the war is won. Thus, although the deprivation, violence, and danger of the front line are rarely denied in the trench journals, they are usually alluded to in a manner that suggests that soldiers, fed up though they may be, can endure them. This resilient willingness to take whatever the war dished out was succinctly expressed in a piece of comic verse that appeared in The B.E.F. Times in February 1918:

What matter though the wily Hun

With bomb, and gas and many a gun

In futile fury, lashes out,

Don’t worry what it’s all about –

This philosophy of ‘sticking it’ also pervades soldiers’ songs, another valuable indicator of troop sentiment. As with the content of the trench journals, the songs composed and sung by British soldiers during the war both reflected and reinforced the popular ethos or culture of the British army on active service. Like the journalistic material, they were also heavily indebted to the music hall and theatrical revue culture of Edwardian Britain, and, although their lyrics were occasionally quite bitter, ⁶² they mostly poked fun at the gloomy predicament of the ordinary soldier. Importantly, moreover, violence is depicted in soldiers’ songs in much the same mock-heroic way as it is in the journals. The last two verses of a popular ditty entitled ‘If the Sergeant Steals Your Rum’ provide a highly representative example, and although the lyrics are perhaps more graphic the theme is strikingly similar to that of the poem cited above:

If old Jerry shells the trench,

Never mind!

If old Jerry shells the trench,

Never mind!

Though the blasted sandbags fly

You have only once to die,

If old Jerry shells the trench,

Never mind!

If you get stuck on the wire,

Never mind!

If you get stuck on the wire,

Never mind!

Though the light’s as broad as day,

When you die they stop your pay,

If you get stuck on the wire,

Never mind! ⁶³

As with the more humorous trench journalism, the prospect of dying a horrible death is not denied, but presented as a trivial and rather comic fact of life. John Brophy and Eric Partridge, veterans and authors of a popular lexicon of soldiers’ songs and slang, argued that knowledge of such songs ‘did not alter or diminish the incidence of shells that burst around [the soldier in the line]’ but ‘may well have reduced the emotional stress caused by fear, and aided him, after the experience, to pick his uncertain way back to sanity again’. ⁶⁴ Writing over a decade after the Armistice, Robert Graves recalled that the songs sung by the men of the 2/Welch Fusiliers that were specifically ‘about the war’ expressed a fear of death and a yearning desire to go home and were therefore ‘defeatist’. ⁶⁵ Yet in a memorable essay on English identity written in 1940, George Orwell, who was still at school during the conflict, more accurately referred to the soldiers’ songs of the Great War as ‘mock-defeatist’. ⁶⁶ Indeed, for Brophy and Partridge, both of whom had served as privates on the Western Front, the chance to ‘ridicule all heroics’ in song strengthened men’s resolve to endure. Escapist lyrics were thus ‘not symptoms of defeatism, but strong bulwarks against it’. ⁶⁷

The use of humour is crucial here. British soldiers frequently wrote quite seriously about their experiences and gave candid voice to feelings of fear and anxiety in their diaries and personal correspondence. ⁶⁸ When they communicated with each other publicly, however, in their songs, journalism, and daily conversations, they invariably ‘put a brave face’ on their circumstances by employing humour. And while the tone and frames of reference may have differed, humour was as vital to officers as it was to the rank and file. After decades of reflection on the issue of combatant morale, Lord Moran recalled the value of humour as a sustaining force in the resilience, and therefore the courage, of British officers and men on the Western Front:

Only humour helped. Humour that made a mock of life and scoffed at our own frailty. Humour that touched everything with ridicule and had taken the bite out of the last thing, death. It was a working philosophy that carried us through the day, a kind of detachment from the ‘insubstantial pageant of the world’. ⁶⁹

Yet although humour was a central, almost defining component of troop culture during the war, and evidently tells us something about combatant mentalities, historians, with some exceptions, have given it scant attention. In his 1990 study of morale in the British and Dominion armies during the war, which drew largely on the content of the trench journals, J.G. Fuller emphasized the role played by humour in sustaining soldiers’ spirits at the front. ⁷⁰ More recently, Alexander Watson has argued that the ability to view their environment and experiences in a humorous light acted as a valuable coping mechanism for both British and German troops. ⁷¹ Yet the self-deprecating, mock-heroic humour of British soldiers, so clearly revealed in their trench journalism and in the songs they sang, acted not only as a coping mechanism but served also to provide a basic standard of soldierly conduct. The ability to take the violence and deprivation of front-line service in one’s stride, or to appear to do so, represented a paradigm of everyday courage that soldiers both respected in others and attempted to cultivate in themselves.

This combatant conception of front-line courage is captured particularly well in the ‘Old Bill’ cartoons created by Bruce Bairnsfather, an officer who saw active service with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. The comic scenarios dreamed up by Bairnsfather, which clearly echo the atmosphere of the trench journals and soldiers’ songs, became nothing short of a phenomenon during the war years, and the magazine in which they appeared, The Bystander, saw its readership greatly increased. ⁷² The tone and content of The Bystander suggest that it was very much a middle-class publication, and numerous articles on women’s issues, along with ads for ladies’ fashions, lingerie, and nurses’ uniforms reflect the magazine’s significant female readership. Bairnsfather’s work also appears to have genuinely resonated with serving soldiers, however, and postcards and press clippings featuring ‘Old Bill’ cartoons can be found at the Imperial War Museum in the personal papers of officers and men who served on the Western Front. ⁷³ References to Bairnsfather in the recordings of interviews with former privates and NCOs conducted in the 1970s also suggest that over fifty years after the war ended veterans still remembered ‘Old Bill’ as an element of the visual culture of the British army in France and Belgium. ⁷⁴ The widespread popularity of these cartoons, which were presented as ‘Fragments from France’, tells us something quite significant about the self-identity of British soldiers on the Western Front and their conception of courage. The cartoons are certainly amusing and were appreciated as such by civilian men and women as much as by front-line soldiers. But for the men in the trenches they took on a resonance that went beyond their humorous content.

The characters created by Bairnsfather appealed to British troops because they seemed more authentic than the idealized representations of soldiers produced for the civilian population by Richard Caton-Woodville, Harry Payne, and the illustrators of the national press. ⁷⁵ The average soldier could see a good deal of himself in Old Bill and the other characters and relate to their ‘rat-in-a-trap predicaments’. ⁷⁶ Also, and importantly, Old Bill and his pals embodied a set of very practical but nonetheless courageous qualities. They were tough, reliable, stoical, and possessed of the sort of wry humour that could help a man survive army life in general and front-line service in particular. These were not knights or martyrs but ordinary men; the average soldier could identify with their courage and aspire to possess it himself. Bairnsfather’s cartoons, in common with soldiers’ songs and trench journalism, thus both offered and reflected a combatant code of conduct in which courage was closely linked to humour and endurance. As an army chaplain serving on the Western Front observed:

Old Bill symbolises what the men like to see in others and want to see in themselves. He stands for a frame of mind that works. A fellow like that goes through this Hell and comes out on the other side, if he’s lucky, sane. That’s the test; that’s what they want. That kind of spirit is a gospel to them. ⁷⁷

The soldier-journalist Donald Hankey served both in the ranks and as an officer before being killed at the front in 1916. In an article written for the Spectator and entitled ‘Heroes and Heroics’ he touched on the appeal of Bairnsfather’s cartoons, and argued that British soldiers were more comfortable with comic or absurdist depictions of their front-line life than pious representations of martial heroism. Like Mortlock and the trench journalists, Hankey took issue with the romantic image of the ‘Tommy’ that was so popular in the civilian press:

Take Bairnsfather’s picture of the two Tommies sitting in a dug-out, while their parapet is being blow to smithereens about a yard away. It bears the legend, ‘There goes our blinkin’ parapet again!’ The ’eroes in the dug-out are about as unheroic as it is possible to imagine. They are simply a pair of stolid, unimaginative, intensely prosaic Tommies of the British workman type … But the picture does bring home to you that the fellows in the trenches are very ordinary people after all, which is a fact that folk at home are very apt to overlook. And at the same time … it cannot hide the fact that the stoicism of the two ’eroes is rather heroic. ⁷⁸

For Hankey, then, the average British citizen soldier was ordinary enough, but his powers of stoic endurance, and his ability to maintain an air of amused detachment amidst the chaotic violence of the front, were genuinely heroic. Nor was he the only commentator to take this view. Writing in 1915, the young Charles McMoran Wilson proposed that the Bairnsfather cartoons represented ‘a successful attempt to fix the atmosphere of the trenches’ and claimed that they depicted ‘a way of looking at things that alone makes it possible to carry on’. ⁷⁹ He was suggesting that in order to survive at the front and retain a minimum level of courage, soldiers had to become insensitive and avoid over-thinking and internalizing their experiences. He would later revise his views somewhat and concede that men with active imaginations had nonetheless served with distinction at the front. He was also convinced that in a protracted war of attrition the ability to ‘stick it’, and to continue to perform one’s duties despite long-term exposure to enemy fire, was the true mark of courage. For Lord Moran, courage in trench warfare had little to do with martial prowess or chivalry and more to do with winning the inner struggle with fear in order to endure month after month in and out of the line:

By day or by night, in trenches or in billets, whatever the odds, still there was no such thing as one moment’s complete security. So, as the war dragged on, as the wear and tear of trench life told, we came to think less of the gaudy act performed on the spur of the moment, to value more the worth of the man who was prepared to see the thing through. ⁸⁰

The almost belligerent pride with which rank-and-file soldiers regarded their own powers of endurance suggests that they shared this conception of courage. In the winter of 1916 Martin Hardie, a British intelligence officer based at the Censor’s Office on the Western Front, drew on thousands of letters written by privates and NCOs to compile the first of a series of reports on morale in the Third Army. Although many of the men in the Third Army ranks had seen bitter fighting during the Somme offensive and were now facing the prospect of another winter at the front, Hardie discovered that serious complaining was rare. ‘There appears’, he wrote, ‘to be an unfailing readiness, and in most cases, a dogged determination, to see the thing through at any cost.’ ⁸¹ As the following representative examples indicate, the authors of the letters cited in the report seem to subscribe to the same ‘sticking it’ philosophy that permeates the trench journals, songs, and cartoons:

I’m quite fit physically and completely ‘fed up’ mentally – but there’s nothing to do but to stick it and rejoice in the dead certainty that the Hun is getting a damned sight worse than he gives our men. (10.XI.16)

This war is a devil of a job, and who is not fed up with it who knows there is one going on? Well it’s no good getting downhearted or getting in a don’t care mood. We have got the distance to go and its like going on a big route march. The more you can sing, the less distance it seems. (16.XI.16)

Don’t talk about the Advance stopping to hasten my leave. Let them keep on – it’s Hell, but we can stick it, and then the last long leave for everyone. (13.XI.16) ⁸²

In a protracted war of attrition, in which victory remained elusive, personal agency was reduced, and fear had to be repeatedly confronted, the power to ‘stick it’ and behave as if all these things were of no account formed a key component of front-line courage. The determination to endure thus involved a refusal to accept the role of passive victim that trench warfare seemed to push the front-line soldier into. A number of historians concerned with the identity and self-perception of soldiers on the Western Front have commented on the degree to which combatants viewed themselves as victims. Eric Leed has argued that the well-documented comradeship of First World War soldiers derived from their sharing ‘the status and powerlessness of victims’. ⁸³ For Mary Harbeck, the alienating loss of individual control engendered by front-line service led soldiers to believe ‘that they were indeed “victims” of the war’. ⁸⁴ There is little doubt that troop morale fluctuated at the front and that individual soldiers frequently felt like victims, but the ethos or culture of the front-line, as revealed in trench journalism and the other popular sources, emphasized a defiant rejection of victimhood. Humorous mock heroics, and indeed mock defeatism, were an articulate expression of this rejection. The characters in the Bairnsfather cartoons, for example, are often thoroughly beleaguered and fed up, but they are not victims. They are not anonymous, passive, or defeated. And this was clearly part of their appeal to soldiers on active service.

III. Conclusion

In his influential study of combatant identity during the First World War, Eric Leed argued that the front-line soldier’s estrangement from his role as an offensive warrior meant that ‘“Courage,” “honour,” “self-sacrifice,” “heroism” now belonged to those distant, “unreal” worlds outside of the trench system.’ ⁸⁵ The evidence of the trench journals, soldiers’ songs, and Bairnsfather’s popular representations of front-line life suggest, however, that courage was not ‘lost’ at the front but re-imagined.

With reference to pre-war notions of heroism in Britain, Jay Winter has argued that Captain Scott and the other doomed explorers were ‘the quintessential warriors before the war’, ⁸⁶ while Stephanie Barcewski has pointed to the way in which they were honoured as though they had fallen in battle. ⁸⁷ Max Jones’s research, moreover, has demonstrated how the story of Scott’s heroism continued to resonate with British people during the war and, to an even greater degree, in the 1920s and 1930s. ⁸⁸ Yet although these men were commissioned naval officers and seamen, they were not combatants. Their adversary was the natural world in the shape of the unforgiving Antarctic wastes, not an armed enemy force. The British officers and men who served on the Western Front, by contrast, died, killed, and ordered others to kill in a highly mechanized industrial war. Also, and this is crucial, the manner in which men died in the intensely violent world of the front-line was markedly different to the fate that befell the men of the Scott expedition.

Yet despite these obvious differences, elements of the sort of courage associated with Scott and the other explorers clearly resonated with the civilian population during the war and into the post-war period. The perceived chivalry and dignified self-sacrifice of the Antarctic heroes spoke to a British public that suffered unprecedented levels of bereavement and understood their nation’s role in the war as self-evidently righteous and just. In addition, the popular conviction that German soldiers were inherently cruel, barbarous, and cowardly served to enhance the image of the British soldier as good-natured, chivalrous, and brave. In contrast to the civilian resort to the traditional, infantry officers and men were forced by their experiences to re-imagine courage. Fear in an attritional trench war that was dominated by artillery could not be ‘remedied’ or counteracted, pace Colin; it simply had to be endured. The ability to endure, to take what the enemy dished out and ‘stick it’ for the duration, thus became the front-line soldiers’ paradigm of courage. Endurance and determination were also, it should be stressed, part of the story of the Scott expedition. But the popular association of medieval chivalry, Christian self- sacrifice, strenuous action and martial prowess with heroism, so much in evidence in the public response to the Scott story, could not survive the combatant experience of the war. Neither civilians nor front-line personnel entirely rejected or embraced pre-war conceptions of courage during the war years. Rather each group responded to the dynamics of a very novel form of warfare by imagining and constructing an ideal of courage that corresponded with its own distinctive set of experiences and concerns.