Tag Archives: First World War

Being Wounded

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I’ve been working on my essay on ‘Woundscapes of the Western Front, 1914-1918’.  What follows is the section dealing with the act of being wounded, drawn from a series of diaries, letters and memoirs; it’s followed by a section fleshing out the concept of a woundscape which I’ll post in due course [for a preliminary sketch, see here].

Subsequent sections reconstruct the precarious journey of casualties from the point of injury through the aid posts, dressing stations and casualty clearing stations to the base hospitals on the French coast and beyond (for a quick sketch, see here, and for an experimental version inspired by Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a soldier, see here).

This is very much a working version, so please read it as such – and as always I’d welcome any comments or suggestions.  I’ve added some links and images (most of them from my presentations), though those included in the final version are likely to be different.

I should add that this is one part of a much larger project that also considers medical care and casualty evacuation in other war zones: the Western Desert in the Second World War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan and Syria today.

***

John Keegan once remarked that in military histories the wounded seem to ‘dematerialize as soon as they are struck down’. [1] This matters for more than historical reasons, however, because the wounded serve as a testament to what Elaine Scarry insists is ‘the main purpose and outcome of war’, which is to say injuring. This ugly fact, she argues, can be ‘made to disappear from view along many separate paths.’ [2] In order to bring it back, I attempt to have the wounded reappear on – and through – the paths they followed after they were injured. Most of what I have to say is confined to the British Army and its colonial and imperial counterparts from Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa on the Western Front. [3]  The details differ in other militaries and other theatres, but the elemental geography of casualty evacuation was a general one.  My focus is confined to the effects of physical injury and I do not directly address what was eventually diagnosed as ‘shell shock’, but it will soon become clear that the trauma of being wounded was far from a purely physical affair and that it was suffused with emotional reactions that played a vital role in rescue and recovery. [4]

Trauma typically ruptures ordinary language – another of Scarry’s astute insights – and it is scarcely surprising that many witnesses to the broken bodies trailing across the battlefields should have turned to metaphor to convey the enormity of the toll.[5] On 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme [above], a British officer found his trench ‘blocked with wounded men who were trying to make their way back to the dressing station’, and as Capt Radclyffe Dugmore surveyed the scene he was struck by the mechanical nature of both military violence and military medicine.

 ‘Here was this line of men, who little more than an hour ago were normal men in the finest of health and strength, and now maimed, and with every degree of injury, they painfully made their way back to the human repair department. The well men were rapidly moving eastward in countless numbers, going forward to the assistance of their comrades, while the injured so laboriously dragged their way back, two human streams, the sound and the unsound. Before us, all energies were devoted to destruction; behind us, all human power and skill tried to repair the damage.’ [6]

.The language of ‘wrecks’ was commonplace.  To Sister Kate Luard ‘the wards [were] like battlefields, with battered wrecks in every bed.’   The task of casualty evacuation, explained one medical orderly, was ‘to move these helpless pieces of wreckage, as rapidly and comfortably as may be, to the place where they will in due course be repaired.’ [7]  The language of ‘repair’ was a common one too, and I will return to its significance shortly.

Three weeks after Dugmore’s observation, and not far from his position, a wounded Australian soldier making his way from aid post to dressing station described the same awful scene but in a different, animate register:

‘Ahead of us and behind us as far as the eye could see, a long column of walking wounded slowly made their way through the valley and across the ridges.  From a distance the khaki column resembled a huge brown snake crawling across the country.’ [8]

Hartnett’s pained allusion was evidently not to a serpent entwined around a staff, the classical symbol for medicine; the intended effect was altogether more venomous. [9]  Still more sinister was the common imagery of the shambles and the slaughterhouse. Wilfred Owen described the infantry training camp on the French coast at Étaples as ‘neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles.’  In the sixteenth century a shambles was an open-air slaughterhouse, and the term was readily extended to the modern battlefield. Watching the stretcher-bearers file past after the Battle of Festubert with their burden of bloodied bodies one Guards officer recoiled in horror: ‘fine upstanding fellows only a few hours before’, they had become ‘nauseatingly repulsive’,  ‘hideously injured carcases.’ Doctors sometimes had the same reaction and resorted to the same imagery.  ‘Although but a middleman,’ confessed Capt Lawrence Gameson at a dressing station on the Somme, ‘one gets sick of blood’s smell and of the endless everlasting procession of red raw human meat passing through our hands.’If the injured survived they were consigned to a Casualty Clearing Station, what one senior medical officer – one of many, as it turns out – called his ‘Butcher’s Shop’, wherein Philip Gibb was nauseated by the ‘great carving of human flesh’.  One chaplain remembered a surgeon who had been working 24 hours without a break: ‘In the middle of it all he turned away from one table and looked up as another one was being carried in, and he shook his head.  He was covered in blood – we all were – and he said, “This isn’t a hospital, it’s a butchery.”’ [10]

Those two imaginaries, the mechanical and the animate, collided most explosively and intimately in the act of being wounded.  Those who wrote about it often expressed their surprise, even disbelief that it had happened to them – pain came later – or registered the immediate sensation of a tremendous blow. On the first day of the Somme it never occurred to Lt Edward Liveing that he had been wounded:

‘Suddenly I cursed. I had been scalded in the left hip. A shell, I thought, had blown up in a water-logged crump-hole and sprayed me with boiling water. Letting go of my rifle, I dropped forward full length on the ground. My hip began to smart unpleasantly, and I felt a curious warmth stealing down my left leg. I thought it was the boiling water that had scalded me. Certainly my breeches looked as if they were saturated with water. I did not know that they were saturated with blood.’ [11]

But when Sgt R.H. Tawney was hit later the same day he had no doubt he had been hurt:

‘I felt … that I had been hit by a tremendous iron hammer, swung by a giant of inconceivable strength, and then twisted with a sickening sort of wrench so that my head and back banged on the ground, and my feet struggled as though they didn’t belong to me. For a second or two my breath wouldn’t come. I thought – if that’s the right word – “This is death”, and hoped it wouldn’t take long. By-and-by, as nothing happened, it seemed I couldn’t be dying. When I felt the ground beside me, my fingers closed on the nose-cap of a shell. It was still hot, and I thought absurdly, in a muddled way, “this is what has got me”. I tried to turn on my side, but the pain, when I moved, was like a knife, and stopped me dead. There was nothing to do but lie on my back.’ [12]

Three weeks later, still on the Somme, Lt Robert Graves had a similar sensation when he was seriously wounded. ‘An eight-inch shell burst three paces behind me,’ he recalled.

‘I heard the explosion, and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between the shoulder blades, but without any pain.  I took the punch merely for the shock of the explosion; but blood trickled into my eye and, turning faint, I called to Moodie [his company commander]: “I’ve been hit.” Then I fell…’ [13]

His friend Lt Siegfried Sassoon’s reaction to being wounded during the Battle of Arras the following year)was much the same.  He too knew at once that he had been hurt, even if he was not sure how. ‘No sooner had I popped my silly head out of the sap,’ he wrote much later, ‘than I felt a stupendous blow in the back between my shoulders. My first notion was that a bomb [grenade] had hit me from behind, but what had really happened was that I had been sniped from in front…To my surprise I discovered that I wasn’t dead.’ [14]

As these accounts indicate, for many wounded soldiers the proximity of death was palpable: space sensibly contracted to their wound, their body and its immediate surroundings.  ‘A man badly knocked out feels as though the world had spun him off into a desert of unpeopled space,’ Tawney admitted: a feeling heightened by the standing order forbidding troops from stopping to aid the wounded during an advance. ‘Combined with pain and helplessness,’ he continued, ‘the sense of abandonment goes near to break his heart.’ [15]  When Pte David Jones was shot in the leg on the Somme shortly after midnight on 11 June 1916, and left barely able to crawl, a corporal hoisted him on his back until a major saw what he was doing and told him:

 ‘“Drop the bugger here” for stretcher-bearers to find. If every wounded man were to be carried back, their firepower would be cut in half. “Don’t you know there’s a sod of a war on?”’ [16]

Many of the seriously wounded stumbled or crawled into shell-holes to wait for their rescuers; some lay out for days.  On the first day of the Somme Pte A. Matthews was escorting German prisoners back across No Man’s Land, that narrow strip between the opposing lines of trenches, when he was shot in the thigh.  An officer dragged him into a disused trench and bound up his wound as best he could before rejoining the advance. While the trench sheltered Matthews from direct fire (‘shells were bursting all around me’), he realised that unfortunately it also concealed him from the view of any rescuers.  Later that day a company runner chanced to see him and left his water-bottle, but Matthews was unable to move – ‘I might as well have been chained to the ground’ – and as night fell all he could do was shout for help.  Nobody came.  He eked out his iron rations and water, but by the third day it was all gone. The next night a group of wounded men making their way back found Matthews, and shared the iron rations they had scavenged from the dead.  They could do no more for him, but promised to get help.  An hour or two later they returned, disoriented,  and set off in a different direction.  The next night they came back again, ‘in a terrible state’, one of them crawling on his hands and knees.  They shared some biscuits and water before setting out once more; Matthews never saw them again.  The next morning a shell-burst buried the biscuits and pierced his water-bottle, and he was reduced to catching rain in his helmet and drinking from pools of water in the trench. He drifted in and out of consciousness until, ten days later, an officer on patrol found him – ‘nearly treading on me’ –  and dug him out before getting him onto a stretcher. When he reached the Advanced Dressing Station at Sailly he was ‘a mere skeleton’: he had been lying out in No Man’s Land for 14 days. [17] This was something of a record; Matthews’s experience combines bad luck and good luck in equal measure, and it is impossible to know how many others succumbed to their injuries while waiting or, perhaps like the party of wounded men who stumbled back to his trench time and time again, never made it to safety.

If they were fortunate the wounded would have others for comfort and company while they waited, but all any of them had for first aid was a field dressing and an ampoule of iodine.  Capt Harold McGill reckoned that  ‘the obsessing fear of the men was death from hemorrhage’ – understandably so in the absence of effective blood transfusion until late in the war – and the field dressing was the first vital response to bring bleeding under control. [18] One soldier explained:

‘The first field dressing which each man carries sewn in the lining of his tunic has saved many lives. Comprising as it does two pads of gauze and cotton-wool and a bandage, it can be ripped out of its case and clapped on to the wound, and so save the injured man, who may have to lie out hours before he can be taken back to a dressing-station, many risks from loss of blood or outside infection.’ [19]

 

Of course, the utility of the dressing depended on the nature of the wound. The same man recalled a lecture from his Medical Officer, who had explained that a field dressing could be used to stop bleeding from an arm or a leg, but ‘if the man was hit in the body or head – well, the doctor shrugged his shoulders in a way that made us think.’ [20]If they were not alone the wounded might also be able to improvise a tourniquet or even a splint with their bayonet or rifle, and if the iodine bottle had not smashed – unlikely, McGill thought: ‘The men reported to me that during the action they had nearly always found their pocket ampoules of iodine tincture broken when the time came to use them’ [21]– they could make a rudimentary attempt at cleaning the wound.

Given the cascading combination of immediacy, difficulty and uncertainty it is scarcely surprising that the space of the wounded should have contracted so drastically. And yet at the same time that space expanded, partly through what had become the taxing task of traversing even a short distance to relative safety, and partly through the tantalizing prospect of a ‘Blighty’, a wound judged sufficiently serious to require evacuation to Britain (and perhaps beyond for troops who came from elsewhere in the Empire). [22]

Arthur Empey came round from surgery at a Casualty Clearing Station to find rows of soldiers lying on stretchers: ‘The main topic of their conversation was Blighty. Nearly all had a grin on their faces.’ [23]  One medical orderly explained that ‘a wound, even when serious, is the messenger of freedom’ – and he had never met a wounded man who wanted to return to the trenches. [24]Another had ‘only heard of one who said that he was anxious to return there, and he was subsequently transferred to No. 2 General Hospital in Le Havre, where the huge numbers of mental cases were cared for.’ [25]

Even so, the extended space of evacuation was a fraught and dangerous one.  Many of the wounded fell in No Man’s Land, in the front-line trenches themselves, or in broken land during the fluctuating tides of advance and retreat in the opening and closing phases of the war. They were injured in major offensives (‘pushes’), in small raids (‘stunts’) and by routine, almost ritualized shelling and firing (‘the morning hate’).  These were the most immediate danger zones in space and in time, extending back towards the reserve trenches and the small towns and villages in the rear.  The wounded were supposed to move within a legal envelope that protected them from further attack.  The Hague Regulations stipulated that ‘all necessary steps must be taken to spare’ – as far as possible – ‘places where the sick and wounded are collected.’  But that possibility was none the less limited.  Firing and shelling were often notoriously inaccurate, casualty clearing stations were routinely located close to batteries and railheads, and it was not always easy to make out the red cross symbol that was supposed to guarantee protection.  In the final months of the war even base hospitals on the French coast were bombed, while hospital ships crossing the Channel ran the gauntlet of mines and torpedoes. [26] If the wounded imagined travelling through an extended space towards safety, then it was a safety rendered conditional by the continued risk of attack. And the journey itself always exacted its own, sometimes deadly toll on the wounded body, which prompted Patrick MacGill to write of being ‘a passenger on the Highway of Pain that stretched from Lens to Victoria Station’. [27]

My purpose is to reconstruct that highway and the relationship between wounded bodies and the journeys they undertook.  Many of those planning for war had a remarkably sanitized view of both.  When one hard-pressed volunteer with the British Red Cross Society, working at a field hospital in Belgium in September 1914, described her pre-war training she recalled

‘the drill and the white-capped stretcher-bearers at home, and the little messenger boys with their innocuous wounds, which were so neatly and laboriously dressed.

The messenger boys’ wounds were always conveniently placed, and they never screamed and writhed or prayed for morphia when they were being bandaged. And shoulders were not shot away, nor eyes blinded, nor men’s faces – well, not much good ever came of talking of the things one has seen, and they are best left undescribed. “These are not wounds, they are mush,” I heard one surgeon say; and then I thought of the little messenger boys and their convenient fractures.’ [28]

 

The wounds were not the stylised, artfully coloured images of the text book and when G.H. Makins suggested that a survey of them ‘forcibly reminds the observer of the water-colour drawings made by Sir Charles Bell’ he was referring to Bell’s extraordinary ability to convey the horrific damage wrought by musket balls and shrapnel during the Peninsular War.  Bell was a military surgeon and his sketches were no less remarkable for their rendering of the agony, despair and sheer terror of the wounded: a far cry, as he noted, from the text-books. [29]

Similarly, schemes for medical evacuation typically displayed an elegant linear geometry, an abstract grid of transmission lines that resembled what Fiona Reid called ‘a modernist dream’ with no catastrophic breaks or nightmare tangles (Figure 3). [30]  This highly imaginative geography of an evacuation machine, carefully oiled and smoothly running, intersected with debates around a politics of speed. [31]  [For much more, and a detailed case study, see my post on ‘The Leaden Hours’ here].  In the first months of the war there were complaints that it was taking far too long for the wounded to be brought from the firing zone to hospitals on the French coast. These reports provoked sufficient public unease for Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, to send Col Arthur Lee to France to investigate.  In a series of private communications Lee conceded that ‘in surveying the scene from London, or studying it upon a map, questions of transport present no very serious difficulties’, whereas once in France it quickly became obvious that getting the wounded to railheads was complicated by intense enemy shelling, and that the railways were under enormous pressure – ‘the wounded must of course give way to food, ammunition and reinforcements for the fighting forces’ – and with many bridges destroyed and signalling systems dislocated the hastily improvised ambulance trains, often little more than cattle trucks filled with straw, had ‘to slowly explore their own way back towards [the hospitals at] the Base.’ [32]  Two years later the politics of speed had reversed; the concern now was that the RAMC had become so fixated on rapid evacuation that the injured were suffering needlessly.  The debate reached its climax when Sir Almroth Wright, Consultant Physician to the British Expeditionary Force, criticized what he saw as the preoccupation with rapid evacuation, ‘hustling the wounded from hospital to hospital’ he called it, and the overwhelming importance attached to ‘the fact that a [Casualty Clearing Station] has passed so many thousands or tens of thousands of wounded through the wards, evacuating these in a minimum of time so as to be at disposal for reception of more patients.’ He claimed that as soon as a new convoy arrived at a base hospital, and as a direct result of ‘the catastrophes which are associated with long journeys’ from the Casualty Clearing Station, ‘amputations and other operations in large numbers have to be performed upon men who had been judged fit to travel’ (my emphasis). Wright’s complaints were summarily – and angrily – dismissed as ignorant and even ‘stupid’ in what was a bitter personal dispute, and the official response doubled down on the machine-like efficiency of the evacuation system.

What flickers in the fissures of these exchanges is the stubbornly, viscerally bio-physical: injured bodies did not present themselves as pristine plates in a medical atlas and their precarious journeys were not inscribed on the paper trails of an evacuation plan.   The relations between the two were not only intimate; they were also reciprocal. The nature of the wound materially affected evacuation.  Treatment times and pathways for ‘walking wounded’ and stretcher-cases were different, for example, and the worst cases were often the last to reach a Casualty Clearing Station and – if they survived – they travelled much further down the line and ultimately back to Britain.  Those journeys in turn affected the wound: rescuing casualties from No Man’s Land was almost always at the risk of further injuries from enemy fire, for example, and as bearers struggled to carry stretchers over shell-shattered ground and through waterlogged trenches, as ambulances bumped and skidded over muddy tracks and torn-up roads, and as ambulance trains clanked and wheezed their way to the coast, the spasmodic jolting greatly aggravated pain and increased the risk of haemorrhage.

To be continued

[1]John Keegan, The Face of Battle(London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 40; Keegan was referring specifically to General Sir William Napier’s account of the battle of Albuera in 1811, but he was also sharpening a general point.

[2]Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 64.

[3]Regiments were raised from other British colonies in the Caribbean and Africa too, and also in Newfoundland; in some cases colonial and imperial casualties were treated by their own medical services, and in others by the RAMC, though they all worked in close concert with one another.  For a general discussion, which extends to the French and German medical services, see Leo van Bergen, Before my helplesssSight: suffering, dying and military medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London: Routledge, 2016).

[4]On ‘shell shock’ and, of direct relevance to my discussion, what was known as ‘wound shock’, see Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Myers, The human body in the age of catastrophe: brittleness, integration, science and the Great War(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018) especially Ch. 2.

[5]Casualty estimates are notoriously difficult, but on the Western Front more than five million from the Allied armies were wounded, most of them from France and the United Kingdom, and more than three million from the Central Powers, principally Germany and Austria-Hungary.  There were also tens of thousands of civilian casualties, from towns and villages close to the front lines but also from long-distance shelling and air strikes much more distant from battlefields whose boundaries were already dissolving.

[6]Captain A. Radclyffe Dugmore, When the Somme ran red(New York: George H. Doran, 1918) pp. 201-2.  Hence too Mark Harrison’s apt description of a ‘medical machine’ assembled on the Western Front: The Medical War: British Military medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).  The imagery of two streams was a common one too, and so was its mechanical rendering. ‘One of the most stabbing things in this war,’ wrote Sister Kate Luard, ‘is seeing the lines of empty motor ambulances going up to bring down the wrecks who at this moment are sound and fit, and absolutely ready to be turned into wrecks’: John Stevens (ed) Unknown warriors: the letters of Kate Luard1914-1918(Stroud, UK: History Press, 2014) 8 May 1915.

[7]Stevens, Unknown warriors, 10 April 1917; Ward Muir, ‘An intake of wounded’, in Happy though wounded: the book of the 3rdLondon General Hospital(London: Country Life, 1917) p. 64.

[8]H.G. Hartnett, Over the top(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009) p. 60; Hartnett wrote his memoir in the early 1920s from diaries he had kept during the war.

[9]His own journey was a long and painful one. ‘After tramping five or six miles in search of medical attention,’ Hartnett continued, he and his mates ‘finally reached Albert, where the confusion was even worse if that was possible. Long lines of wounded men along the footpaths and roadways were waiting their turn to get attention from doctors and their assistants, stationed at intervals along the roads, out in the open’ (p. 61).  From Albert he was taken by lorry and light railway to a casualty clearing station and, after his wound had been dressed, by ambulance train to Rouen; then it was on to Le Havre and a hospital ship bound for Southampton.

[10]Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters(ed. Harold Owen and John Bell) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) 31 December 1917; ‘An O.E.’ [G.P.A. Fildes], Iron times with the Guards(London: John Murray, 1918) pp. 74-5; Lawrence Gameson, Private Papers, IWM Doc 612; Philip Gibbs, Now it can be told(New York: Harper, 1920) p. 374; Capt Leonard Pearson, in Lyn MacDonald, The Roses of No Man’s Land(London: Penguin, 1993) p. 187.

[11]Edward G.D. Living, Attack: An Infantry Subaltern’s Impression of July 1st, 1916 (New York: Macmillan, 1918) pp. 69-70.  He managed to walk out after one of his men applied iodine and a field dressing to his wound, but walking became steadily more painful; eventually, weak from loss of blood, he was placed on a stretcher and wheeled to an advanced dressing station, and from there he was taken by ambulance to a Casualty Clearing Station.

[12]R.H. Tawney, ‘The attack’, Westminster Gazette, 24-5 October 1916.

[13]Graves confessed that his memory of what happened next was ‘vague’. He was not expected to survive, and was taken to a dressing station where he remained unconscious; when his commanding officer went down and saw him lying in a corner ‘they told him I was done for.’But the next morning an ambulance took Graves to a Casualty Clearing Station, where he remained until 24 July when he was put on an ambulance train for a Base Hospital on the coast and was eventually repatriated to Britain. Meanwhile his commanding officer had written to his mother tendering his condolences at the loss of her son.  Robert Graves, Goodbye to all that (London: Penguin, 2000; first published in 1929) pp. 180-2.

[14]Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an infantry officer(London: Faber, 1930).  This is a fictionalised account of Sassoon’s experience on 16 April 1917; he recorded his more immediate reactions in his journal but said virtually nothing about the initial shock of being hit.  He left the trench as ‘walking wounded’ and, after his wound was dressed at an aid post, was driven to a Casualty Clearing Station: Sassoon Journal, Cambridge University Library MS Add. 9852/1/10.h

[15]Tawney, ‘Attack’.

[16] Jones resumed his crawl and was eventually found by a bearer party:  Thomas Dilworth, David Jones and the Great War (London: Enitharmon Press, 2012) p. 117. Tiplady, Soul of the soldier, p. 131 explained the logic behind the injunction: ‘When a man falls his neighbor cannot stay with him. He must press on to the objective, otherwise, if the unwounded stayed to succor the wounded, there would be none to continue the attack.’ This was of course emotionally hard. ‘The grimmest order to me was that no fighting soldier was to stop to help the wounded,’ one sergeant confessed.  ‘The CO was very emphatic about this. It seemed such a heartless order to come from our CO who was … looked upon as a religious man. I thought bringing in the wounded was the way Victoria Crosses were won. But I realized that this would be an order to the CO as well as us from the General and that the whole of the attack could be held up if there were many wounded and we stopped to help them’: Sgt Charles Moss, in Richard van Emden,  The Somme(Barnsley UK: Pen and Sword, 2016) p. 00.

[17]A. Matthews, ‘I was fourteen days in No Man’s Land’, I Was There!pp. 688-691; Capt A.W. French, War Diary (Liddle Collection), 14 July 1916.  For another vivid account of a survivor, see the memoir written after the war by John Stafford describing his wounding on the Somme on 8 August 1916:https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/2020601/contributions_3155.html?q=%22John+Stafford%22.

[18]McGill, Medicine and Duty, pp. 118-9.

[19]Arthur Mills, Hospital Days(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916) p. 14.

[20]Mills, Hospital days, p.

[21]McGill, Medicine and Duty, p. 157.

[22]‘Blighty’, a corruption of the Urdu vilayati(‘foreign’ or ‘European’)  was first used by Indian soldiers to refer to Britain in the Boer War; its use became widespread in the First World War.

[23]Arthur Empey, Over the top(New York: G.P. Putnam, 1917) p. 00.

[24]Christopher Arnander (ed), Private Lord Crawford’s Great War Diaries(Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2013) 30 September 1915.  ‘To these men,’ Crawford added, ‘the relief of leaving the front honourably wounded is inconceivable after months of killing, anxiety and fatigue.’ David Lindsay, the Earl of Crawford, enlisted in the RAMC as a private in April 1915 at the age of 43; in July 1916 he returned to the UK as a member of the coalition government.

[25]M.R. Werner, Orderly!(New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930) p. 76.

[26]Stephen McGreal, The war on hospital ships, 1914-1918(Barnsley UK: Pen and Sword, 2009).

[27]Patrick MacGill, The Great Push: an episode of the Great War(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1916) p. 254. This was a memoir lightly disguised as fiction; MacGill was wounded at Loos on 28 September 1915, and in the preface wrote that he had ‘tried to give, as far as I am allowed, an account of an attack in which I took part’ (p. 7).

[28]Sarah Macnaughtan, A woman’s diary of the war(London: Nelson, 1916) p. 23.  Similar make-believe drills took place behind the front lines, where they were met with a healthy cynicism by ‘wounded’ and stretcher bearers alike.  ‘After heavy losses we would get reinforcements and this would be followed by a Field Day to break in the newcomers’, explained one orderly with a Field Ambulance.  ‘Men with labels describing their supposed injuries were hidden in unlikely spots and had to be found and dealt with as if actually wounded’: Edwin Ware, Diary,p. 94 [WL:RAMC/PE/1/707].  One private recalled a rehearsal for a ‘special stunt’ in which he played a casualty: ‘My wounds were not too painful to prevent my enjoyment of the spectacle while waiting for the stretcher bearers, who did not seem in a great hurry. Casualties here had their own choice of wounds, and they all seemed to prefer some wound which made it impossible to walk a step, much to the disgust of the stretcher bearers.After some argument with the stretcher bearers who came at last to attend to me, I was bundled unceremoniously on to a stretcher with my mess tin making itself unpleasant in the middle of my back, despite the fact that both my legs had been shattered (in theory)’: Doreen Priddey (ed.), A Tommy at Ypres: Walter’s War(Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2011) 5-9 December 1916.

[29]G.H. Makins, ‘A note upon the wounds of the present campaign’, The Lancet, 10 October 1914 (p. 905); M.K. H. Crump and P. Starling, A surgical artist at war: the paintings and sketches of Sir Charles Bell 1807-1815 (Edinburgh: Royal College of Surgeons, 2005).  Bell uncannily prefigured the horrors for which his successors were equally ill-prepared one hundred years later.  ‘The cases I have had under my care,’ he wrote in his Dissertation on gunshot wounds(1814), ‘have proved to me that the books we possess upon the subject of field-practice do not even hint at the nature of the difficulties the surgeon has to encounter there.’

[30]Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) p. 19.

[31]Derek Gregory, ‘The politics of speed and casualty evacuation on the Western Front, 1914-1918’, forthcoming.

[32]

More-than-human casualties

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Apologies for the long silence – I’ve made several trips to the UK to deliver lectures, but I’ve also been (almost literally) in the trenches.  My supposed-to-be 8,000 word essay on ‘Woundscapes of the Western Front’ has morphed into a monster: 35,000 words and I’m still not done….  More on that eventually (I so hope…).  But en route, and in part as a response to a question I was asked after one of my presentations, I want to elaborate on a footnote.

My essay is about the evacuation of wounded soldiers, but human bodies were not the only ones requiring medical attention on the Western Front. By August 1917 the British Army had 368,000 horses and 82,000 mules in Belgium and France.  At the outbreak of the war the cavalry were expected to play their traditional role –

[Image: National Library of Scotland]

– but by the end of the war most horses were pulling gun limbers, ammunition trains, supply waggons and ambulances [more here].

Horse-drawn ambulances were never made obsolete by motor ambulance convoys.  Their capacity was limited and they were very slow – ‘hopelessly immobile’, according to one senior RAMC officer – but they remained the only option in some places. On the Somme in July 1916 the ground was so pitted with shell-holes that motor ambulances could not be used close to the line and horse ambulances worked for 24 hours or more at a stretch, ferrying casualties to motor ambulance convoys waiting further back:

Not surprisingly, horses (and mules) were highly vulnerable to shelling and shrapnel, to gas attacks and, wherever environmental conditions deteriorated, to injuries from traversing near-impossible terrain:

There is a haunting scene in Erich Maria Remarque‘s  All quiet on the Western Front:

‘The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly.
“Wounded horses,” says Kat.
It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning….

They’ve got to get the wounded men out first,’ says Kat. We stand up and try to see where they are. If we can actually see the animals, it will be easier to cope with. Meyer has some field glasses with him. We can make some bigger things, black mounds that are moving. Those are the wounded horses. But not all of them. Some gallop off a little way, collapse, and then run on again. The belly of one of the horses has been ripped open and its guts are trailing out. It gets its feet caught up in them and falls, but it gets to its feet again. Detering raises his ri e and takes aim. Kat knocks the barrel upwards. ‘Are you crazy?’ Detering shudders and throws his gun on the ground. We sit down and press our hands over our ears. But the terrible crying and groaning and howling still gets through, it penetrates everything. We can all stand a lot, but this brings us out in a cold sweat. You want to get up and run away, anywhere just so as not to hear that screaming any more. And it isn’t men, just horses.

Yet far more equine losses were attributed to disease than enemy action, in contrast to troop losses (the First World War was the first in which deaths from wounds exceeded deaths from disease by a ratio of 2:1). One driver had a simple explanation. ‘Owing to the importance of the horses, whose lives were of greater value than those of the men, the horse-lines were usually in places free, or practically free from “strafing”’: Charles Bassett, Horses were more valuable than men (London: PublishNation, 2014) p. 65.

The horse-lines were indeed in the rear (see the remarkably pastoral image below: Glisy, on the Somme), but the nature of their work ensured that horses and mules had to be taken right up to the fire zone; between 1914 and 1916 battle losses accounted for 25 per cent of equine deaths, and they soared thereafter.

Last year Philip Hoare described these animals as ‘the truly forgotten dead.’ He continued: ‘Sixteen million animals “served” in the first world war – and the RSPCA estimates that 484,143 horses, mules, camels and bullocks were killed in British service between 1914 and 1918.

Yet, just as with human bodies, the toll of the equine dead overlooks that of the wounded.  In response to the military importance of horses and mules, the (Royal) Army Veterinary Corps [the ‘Royal’ prefix was granted immediately after the war] established a system of veterinary medicine parallel to the casualty evacuation system of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

The equivalent of the Field Ambulance was the Mobile Veterinary Section; animals needing more extensive emergency care were transferred to Veterinary Evacuation Stations (the equivalent of the Casualty Clearing Station) located at railheads.  They were moved either by horse-drawn ambulance –

– or by special motor ambulances designed to carry two horses each (there were 26 of them, donated by the RSPCA and subscribed from public donations):

Like wounded soldiers, horses needing further medical or surgical attention were transported by barge (mainly in Flanders: each barge could carry 32 animals)  –

– or by rail to Veterinary Hospitals at the base on the French coast.

In the first months of the war cattle trucks on supply trains returning empty to the base were used (here too the parallels with the evacuation of wounded soldiers are exact!) but once the Veterinary Evacuating Stations had been established special horse trains were introduced.  These had to be more or less self-sufficient: supplies of water were especially vital.  Major-General  Sir John Moore emphasised: ‘In transporting sick and enfeebled animals, particularly by train, which during hot seasons of the year is very exhausting, the greatest care must be exercised in watering and feeding en route.’  The need was compounded by the slow and often circuitous journeys made by trains that – like the ambulance trains carrying wounded soldiers – always had to yield to troop trains and supply trains rushing up to the front.

Between 18 August 1914 and 23 January 1919 over half a million sick and wounded animals passed through the British Army’s Mobile Veterinary Sections and Veterinary Evacuating Stations in Flanders and France.  On average a special train carrying 100 sick or injured horses would arrive twice a day at each Veterinary Hospital; between 2,500 and 3,500 horses were admitted to hospital each week, and at their peak more than 4,500 were being cared for at any one time.

The capacity of these hospitals was originally set at 1,000 animals, but this was subsequently doubled.  It was not uncommon, Moore explained, ‘to see three animals in the operating theatre under chloroform at the same time.’

Very few animals were allowed to stay more than three months at the base, where the hospitals operated in conjunction with Convalescent Horse Depots.

According to Moore, the core principle of the Army Veterinary Corps was ‘to get down from the front as many animals as it was possible to save; in other words to give every animal a chance.’  But what lay behind this was the same instrumentalism that guided the RAMC’s casualty evacuation model and its system of triage: the need identify the casualties most likely to survive in short order and to treat them expeditiously so that they could be returned to the front and the fight.

***

You can find more from these sources:

  • Simon Butler, The war horses (Halsgrove, 2011);
  • Stephen Corvi, ‘Men of Mercy: the evolution of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps and the soldier-horse bond during the Great War,’ Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 76 (308) (1998) 272-84;
  • M-G Sir John Moore, Army Veterinary Service in War (London: Brown, 1921) [available here]
  • Rachael Passmore, ‘The care, development and importance of the British horse on the Western Front in World War I,’ MA thesis, Department of History, University of Leeds, 2009 [accessible here];
  • John Singleton, ‘Britain’s military use of horses 1914-1918’, Past & Present 139 (1993) 178-203.

Like my original essay, this post is confined to the British Army; for a remarkably detailed and beautifully illustrated account of the veterinary medical system of the US Army on the Western Front see here.

Unless otherwise credited, ALL IMAGES are Copyright Imperial War Museum, London

The Longest Journey

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The Field Ambulances from the Royal Army Medical Corps were put to work in the war-ravaged landscapes of the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres; the broken bodies in their charge (above) were transferred to Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise in northern France, and at noon the next day a battered military ambulance rattled its noisy way to the Quai Gambetta at Boulogne where HMS Verdun was waiting.

The ship slipped anchor shortly before noon and ploughed through the mist across the Channel to Dover, where it rode outside the Western entrance before steaming along the southern breakwater to the Eastern entrance, like countless hospital ships before it, and finally made fast at Admiralty Pier.

At ten to six that same evening a special train steamed out of Dover Marine Station into a cold, wet and moonless night.  No local people had been allowed on to the pier at Dover, but it was a different story all along the route to London:

‘At the platforms by which they rushed could be seen groups of women waiting and silent…  Many an upper window was open, and against the golden square of light was silhouetted, clear-cut and black, the head and shoulders of some faithful watcher.  In the London suburbs there were lines of houses with back doors flung open wide, and framed in the lampshine flooding out into the gloom two or three figures of men and women and children gazing out at the great lighted train whirling by…’

The train arrived at Victoria shortly after 8.30 p.m., where crowds had been waiting patiently for hours.

In many ways it was a journey like all the others.  Between September 1914 and November 1918 hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers from Britain and across its Empire had been rescued from the battlefields in Belgium and France, and many of the most seriously wounded had made the precarious crossing from Boulogne (below) and other ports to ‘Blighty’.  

(c) IWM (Imperial War Museums); Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

At Dover (below) or Southampton they were loaded on to special hospital trains:

Along the permanent way, ‘all the women and children by the side of the railway were at their windows or in their gardens, waving their hands’ as the hospital trains thundered by.

When they reached London they were greeted by large crowds, policemen snapping to attention and saluting as they stopped the traffic to allow the stream of ambulances to pass slowly through the streets: 

Imperial War Museum, London; (c) IWM (Imperial War Museums); Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Yet this particular journey was no was no ordinary one, for those bearer parties had been deployed on 7 November 1920 and the special train arrived in London three days later. 

The body was that of the ‘Unknown Warrior’, selected from one of four that had been transported to the chapel at Saint-Pol – the other three, according to some accounts, were unceremoniously ‘tipped into a shell hole beside the road near Albert’ –  and its journey ended with a solemn procession past Edwin Landseer Lutyens‘ newly inaugurated Cenotaph (which, true to its name, remained empty) and burial in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920.

It was also, in its way, the long journey of all.  Not many of those who were wounded made it back to Britain in four days, as I will show in a later post, but the chronology of the Unknown Warrior’s passage was deceptively protracted (and I use that adverb advisedly).  The intention was to allow grieving families and friends to believe that the Unknown Warrior could be their husband, lover, brother, or son, killed in any year of the war and drawn ‘from any of the three services, Army, Navy or Air Force, and from any part of the British Isles, Dominions or Colonies.’  Yet the Field Ambulances received secret instructions stipulating that the remains they recovered had to be of soldiers mortally wounded in 1914.

The reason, according to Neil Hanson in The Unknown Soldier, was to ensure that ‘decomposition was sufficiently far advanced to obviate the need for cremation’ and, presumably, to minimise the possibility of identification.  Then he adds:

‘For military traditionalists this also had the side-benefit of ensuring that the Unknown Warrior would be an Anglo-Saxon member of the British Expeditionary Force – a regular soldier – rather than one of Kitchener’s New Army of civilian volunteers or one of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers drawn from the far-flung reaches of the Empire’ (p. 432).

But this is misleading: even in 1914 it was not ‘all white on the Western Front’; troops from the Indian Army arrived at Marseilles at the end of September, and the Lahore Division played a vital part in resisting the German advance in October and November around La Bassée and Neuve Chapelle.

The passage of the Unknown Warrior was distinguished not only by its ceremony but also by its rarity.  In the first months of the war the bodies of some servicemen who had been killed were returned to Britain, but these were private arrangements that were abruptly terminated by an official order in April 1915 forbidding exhumation or repatriation (reaffirmed by Haig in a General Routine Order in December 1917). As a result precious few of Britain’s war dead made that final journey home: most were buried close to where they died, and their bodies were eventually gathered into military cemeteries across Flanders and northern France, at first by the British Red Cross Society’s Mobile Unit and then by the units of the Graves Registration Commission attached to the Army Service Corps (later the Imperial War Graves Commission).  

Here is one officer, Rowland Feilding, describing the aftermath of the Somme in a letter to his wife in 1917:

‘A land whose loneliness is so great that it is almost frightening. A land of wooden crosses, of which, wherever you may stand, you can count numbers dotted about, each indicating a soldier’s grave, and the spot where he fell.

After several miles of this I came upon the first living human beings —parties of the Salvage Corps, working forwards from the old battle line, gathering up all that is worth saving of the relics…

Further back, I came upon the work of the Graves Registration Unit, which, behind the Salvage men, follows the Army forward. Its job is to “prospect” for the dead, and, so skilful have its members become at detecting the position of a buried soldier, that their “cuttings” seldom draw blank. Indeed, this is not surprising, for, no matter where they look, they are almost certain to find what they are searching for. Then they dig up the decomposed fragments, to see if they can identify them, which they seldom do; —after which they re-bury them, marking the spot with the universal wooden cross.’

‘The names of the dead,’ Feilding continued, ‘are generally undiscoverable’ – and it was this sober realisation, and the sight of a grave outside Armentières in 1916 marked ‘An Unknown British Soldier’, that gave an army chaplain, the Reverend David Railton MC, the idea of a collective memorial in London.

As Feilding’s letter makes plain, the scale of the slaughter would have made identification and repatriation immensely difficult, but the decision was plainly prompted by more than practicality (though the task of keeping track of the dead was formidable in itself: the image below is an extract from a ‘body density map‘ produced by the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries after the war; it records, grid square by grid square, the number of bodies recovered from just a fragment of the Somme battlefield before their reinterment in military cemeteries).

But the decision to forbid repatriation was more than a matter of logistics or even cost.  Reading lists of officer casualties in the Times was sober enough – and only officers’ families received the dread telegram; the families of other ranks had to wait for a form letter – but it would have been a far cry from the effect of seeing the physical return of so many dead.  The debate was not settled by the end of hostilities, and a politics of repatriation continued to swirl around the landscape of memorialisation.

(You can find much more in David Crane, Empires of the Dead: how one man’s vision led to the creation of WWI’s war graves (London: Collins, 2013) and the brilliant Richard van Emden, The Quick and the Dead: fallen soldiers and their families in the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

It is those numberless dead who haunt the collective memory of the First World War: the white crosses in military cemeteries, the black names on war memorials, and all those nameless, placeless bodies represented by the Unknown Warrior.

That is understandable; but behind the remembering is a forgetting. John McCrae’s elegiac poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ is recited on Remembrance Day every year – ‘In Flanders fields the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row’ – but he wrote those lines on 3 May 1915 to commemorate the death of a close friend who had been buried the night before, and he did so sitting on the tailboard of an ambulance at Essex Farm Advanced Dressing Station near Ypres. How many remember that McCrae was a Medical Officer with the Canadian Field Artillery, who knew better than most that what lay behind his haunting lament – and beyond his medical post dug in to the side of the Yser canal – was a vast field of wounded men?

And when the two minute silence (introduced in Cape Town in 1918 and first observed in London in 1919) descends at 11 a.m. on 11 November every year how many of those who mark it know that the original purpose was not only to remember and reflect on those who gave their lives but also, in the first minute, to honour those who returned from the fight? Many of them had been wounded (often more than once) and they had made their own precarious journeys back from the battlefields.  It was a shockingly common experience: Emily Mayhew reminds us that on the Western Front ‘almost every other British soldier could expect to become a casualty, with physical injuries ranging in severity from light wounds to permanent, life-changing disabilities.’   And yet, she continues, ‘in the historical record of the First World War, the wounded and the men and women who cared for them are an undiscovered, somehow silenced group.’

It is those other journeys – of the wounded bodies and the woundscapes through which they moved – that are the central focus of my research on the First World War.  And, as regular readers will know, I extend that analysis to the deserts of North Africa in the Second World War, to Vietnam, and to Afghanistan, Gaza and Syria in our own troubled present.  Later modern war is far from disembodied.

War in Black-and-White?

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Peter Jackson‘s They Shall Not Grow Old receives its premiere tomorrow (16 October) as the Special Presentation at the BFI London Film Festival.  Four years ago the director of Lord of the Rings was approached by the Imperial War Museum in London, which gave him access to hundreds of hours of official footage of the First World War, together with later audio tapes from both the IWM and the BBC.  Working with the visual effects geniuses at Jackson’s WingNut Films in New Zealand to colorise, slow and re-animate the film clips, and calling in lip-readers to decode the silent footage, the result is a radically new, feature-length representation of the conflict.  He explained:

“[The men] saw a war in colour, they certainly didn’t see it in black and white.  I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more – rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.”

You can find details of subsequent screenings – in 2D and 3D – here, and the film will also be televised on BBC1.

Jackson is right of course: those who served in the war didn’t see it in black and white (as often as not, in multiple shades of red and brown).  But In its press release the IWM notes:

The First World War proved to be a landmark in cinema history – the first time that the horrors of war could be caught on camera. Many hours of dramatic footage were filmed on the battlefields, capturing the realities of the conflict in remarkable and unprecedented detail. This footage provided the public at home with astonishing access to the frontline: The Battle of the Somme, a documentary film produced with the cooperation of the War Office, was seen by an estimated 20 million Britons in its first six weeks of release.

In other words, the British public did see the war in black and white.

I discussed The Battle of the Somme ten days ago in Leipzig, in order to draw a series of parallels and contrasts between visual representations of the First World War and military violence a hundred years later.  My starting-point was Samuel Hynes‘ observation in A war imagined that was in effect repeated by the IWM in its introduction to They Shall Not Grow Old:

‘[F]or the first time in history non-combatants at home could see the war. The invention of the half-tone block had made it possible to print photographs in newspapers, and so to bring realistic-looking images into every house in England….

‘Even more than the still photographs, though, it was the motion picture that made the war imaginable for the people at home.’

The Battle of the Somme was filmed by Geoffrey Malins – who had already made 26 short newsreel films on the Western Front – and John McDowell on behalf of the British Topical Committee for War Films.  It was no short film shown as a prelude to the main feature – it ran for 77 minutes – and went on general release in August 1916.

Here is Malins filming the preliminary bombardment of the ‘Big Push’ on 1 July 1916 (I’ve taken this from his own account, How I Filmed the War, which you can access from Project Gutenberg here):

(If you want a much more detailed, forensic account of the filming then you need Alastair Fraser, Andrew Robertshaw and Steve Roberts, Ghosts on the Somme: Filming the battle, June-July 1916 [2009]).

Malins and McDowell completed most of their filming in June and July, but they were restricted in what they could capture.  Luke McKernan explains:

’Their hand-cranked cameras had single 50mm lenses with poor depth of field, they had no telephoto lenses, the orthochromatic film stock was slow, making filming action in the distance or in poor light difficult. But there was also military control and official censorship, each preventing them from filming anything other than officially-sanctioned images.’

Producer Charles Urban decided that the centrepiece of the finished film would be a sequence showing infantry going over the top – but Malins had only filmed the attack from a distance while McDowell’s footage shot from elsewhere on the Front was unusable. So Malins returned to France to re-stage the attack at a British mortar training school near St Pol between 12 and 19 July: just 21 seconds of his footage were incorporated into the final version.

‘In this footage,’ Laura Clouting explained,

‘men go into action unencumbered by the weighty packs that real soldiers had to shoulder. With just a rifle in his hand, one man drops “dead” in front of barbed wire – and proceeds to cross his legs to get more comfortable on the ground. Most telling is the camera position. Had Malins or McDowell really been filming from this angle they would have been in considerable danger from German fire. But the audience had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the footage.’

That last sentence is crucial, and indeed the staged sequence has received disproportionate attention from critics; Nicholas Reeves, in a thoughtful and helpful survey [‘Cinema, spectatorship and propaganda: ‘Battle of the Somme’ (1916) and its contemporary audience’, Historical journal of film, radio and television 17 (1) (1997) 5-28], notes that ‘Like almost every so-called documentary film, Battle of the Somme does include faked or ‘improved’ sequences, but focusing attention on these few sequences at the expense of the authentic footage which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the film seriously misrepresents its character…’

Audiences were certainly captivated by the film:

The film provoked a lively public debate about the propriety of showing the dead and the wounded:

But for Hynes no less important was the very structure of the film and the modernist space within which it portrayed military violence:

Hynes’s conclusion:

‘In this film, war is not a matter of individual voluntary acts, but of masses of men and materials, moving randomly through a dead, ruined world towards no identifiable objective; it is aimless violence and passive suffering, without either a beginning or an end — not a crusade, but a terrible destiny. The Somme film changed the way civilians imagined the war’ (my emphasis).

But – to return to They Shall Not Grow Old – those who had direct experience of the war saw matters differently.  The Manchester Guardian‘s correspondent reported:

‘I accompanied a friend, a lettered man, who was slightly wounded in the “Big Push,” to see the official film of the Somme battle. “Well,” I said as we came out, “that’s like the real thing, isn’t it?” “Yes,” he answered slowly; “about as like as a silhouette is like a real person, or as a dream is like a waking experience. There is so much left out – the stupefying din, the stinks, the excitement, the fighting at close quarters. You see enough to appreciate General Sherman’s remark that war is hell, but the hell depicted is as mild to the real hell out there as Homer’s hell is to Dante’s.’

Or, as the brilliant Max Plowman put it (in a book originally published under a pseudonym):

Note:  I haven’t seen They Shall Not Grow Old yet, so I can’t comment on its representational geography – though, just like the Battle of the Somme, there were limitations on what the military permitted to be filmed and I doubt that all theatres of war or all contingents were represented – but there is of course quite another sense in which the war was not fought in black and white: see my commentary ‘All white on the Western Front?’ here.

Anatomy of another soldier

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I’ve drawn attention to Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a soldier before: see here and here (and especially ‘Object lessons’: DOWNLOADS tab).  Most of the reviews of the novel were highly favourable, applauding Parker’s experimental attempt to tell the story of a soldier seriously wounded by an IED in Afghanistan through the objects with which he becomess entangled.

But writing in The Spectator Louis Amis saw it as an object lesson in ‘How not to tell a soldier’s story‘.  He complained that Parker’s device produced a narrative

‘as if the war were composed only of its inanimate processes, either accidental or inevitable. It’s a different planet to the bloody, profane, outlaw Iraq of [Phil] Klay’s Redeployment, radiating shame, PTSD and suicide, and the unbearable awkwardness of transmitting such truths to an alienated civilian world.

Parker’s device gestures aptly towards a spreading out of consciousness, a transmutation, the scattering of the individual along some plane at the threshold of death; the sensations of depersonalisation and hyper-perceptivity associated with traumatic experience; and the soothing quiddity of simple objects, as opposed to abstract thought, for a recovering victim. But it is also a method of averting the gaze from a war’s futility and waste, and worse — and probably, therefore, too, from the true nature of any saving grace.’

I do think Parker’s narrative accomplishes more than Amis allows. It succeeds in making the war in Afghanistan at once strange and familiar; and its strangeness comes not from the people of Afghanistan, that ‘exotic tableau of queerness’ exhibited in so many conventional accounts, but through the activation of objects saturated with the soldier’s sweat, blood and flesh.  It’s also instructive to read the novel alongside Jane Bennett‘s Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things or Robert Esposito‘s Persons and things, as I’ve done elsewhere, and to think through the corpo-materialities of modern war and its production of the battle space as an object-space: but neither of these has much to say about how their suggestive ideas might be turned to substantive account.

Still, Amis’s point remains a sharp one; Scottt Beauchamp says something very similar:

Harry Parker goes further than [Tim] O’Brien [in The things they carried] in giving equal narrative play to nonhuman things. Not only do they make the plot of Parker’s novel possible, they also bear semiconscious witness to our shared reality, corroborating it. Their inability to pass moral judgment comes off as a silent accusation. If this ontological shift toward objects is the most honest way we have of talking about war, it’s still limiting: it turned its weakness—its inability to fully articulate the moral significance of war—into a defining characteristic.

But I haven’t been able to let Parker’s experiment go.  So, for one of my presentations in Durham last month – on the parallels and differences between combat medical care and casualty evacuation on the Western Front in the First World War and Afghanistan a century later – I sketched out an Anatomy of another soldier.  It’s based on my ongoing archival work; earlier in the presentation I had used diaries, letters, memoirs, sketches and photographs to describe what Emily Mayhew calls the ‘precarious journey’ of British and colonial troops through the evacuation chain – you can see a preliminary version in ‘Divisions of life’ here – so this experiment was a supplement not a substitute.  But I wanted to see where it would take me.

So here are the slides; they ought to be self-explanatory – or at any rate, sufficiently clear – but I’ve added some additional notes.  I should probably also explain that in each case the object in question appeared on the slide at the end of its associated narrative.

***

I discuss aerial photography and trench mapping on the Western Front – and the difficulty of navigating the shattered landscapes of trench warfare – in ‘Gabriel’s map: cartography and corpography in modern war’ (DOWNLOADS tab).

You can find a short account of the synchronisation of officers’ watches on the Western Front in ‘Homogeneous (war) time’ here.

A shortage of cotton (combined with its relatively high cost) together with the extraordinary demand for wound dressings prompted the War Office to use sphagnum moss – the British were years behind the Germans and the French in appreciating its antiseptic and absorbent qualities, which also required dressings to be changed less often.  You can get the full story from Peter Ayres, ‘Wound dressing in World War I: the kindly sphagnum moss’, Field Bryology 110 (2013) 27-34 here.

But one RAMC veteran [in ‘Field Ambulance Sketches’, published in 1919] insisted on the restorative power of the white bandage, administered not by regimental stretcher bearers but by the experts of the Royal Army Medical Corps’s Field Ambulance:

The brown first field dressing, admirable as it is from a scientific point of view, always looks a desperate measure; and if it slips, as it generally does on a leg wound, it becomes for the patient merely a depressing reminder of his plight. A clean white dressing, though it may not be nearly so satisfactory in the surgeon’s eyes, seems to reassure a wounded man strangely. It makes him feel that he is being taken care of, gives him a kind of status, and stimulates his sense of personal responsibility. With a white bandage wound in a neat spiral round his leg, he will walk a distance which five minutes earlier, under the dismal suggestion of a first field dressing, he has declared to be utterly beyond his powers.

I borrowed the white maggots (and some of the other details of the wounds) from John Stafford‘s extraordinary, detailed recollection of being wounded on the Somme in August 1916 available here.

Carrying a stretcher across a mud-splattered, shell-blasted landscape was immensely tiring and it was all too easy to lose one’s bearings.  From ‘A stretcher-Bearer’s Diary’, 17 September 1916:

‘The shell fire, and the mud, are simply beyond description, and it is a miracle that any escape being hit. We have to carry the wounded shoulder high, the only way it can be done, because of the mud. Our shoulders are made raw by the chafing of the stretcher handles, although we wear folded sandbags under our shoulder straps. Sweat runs into our eyes, until we can hardly see. When a barrage comes we must keep on and take no notice, as even if we could find cover, there is none for the man on the stretcher….

‘…The rain has made the ground a sea of mud, and we have to carry the wounded three miles to the Dressing Stations, as the wheeled stretchers cannot be used at all. Two men using stretcher slings could not carry a man thirty yards, and I have seen four bearers up to their knees in mud, unable to move without further assistance.

By the time of the 3rd Battle of Ypres, it could take eight men to carry a stretcher half a mile to an aid post – and it could take them two hours to do it.

Even in ideal circumstances, manoeuvering a stretcher down a narrow, crowded trench was extremely difficult, ‘like trying to move a piano down an avenue of turnstiles.’  During major offensives a one-way system was in operation, and stretcher bearers were supposed to use only the ‘down’ trenches.  From the Aid Posts the RAMC stretcher-bearers of the Field Ambulance would take over from the regimental stretcher-bearers.  Here is one young novice, Private A.F. Young with the 2n3/4th London Field Ambulance:

Step by step we picked our way over the duckboards. It is useless to try and maintain the regulation broken step to avoid swaying the stretcher. Slowly we wind our way along the trenches, our only guide our feet, forcing ourselves through the black wall of night and helped occasionally by the flash of the torch in front. Soon our arms begin to grow tired and the whole weight is thrown on to the slings, which begin to bite into our shoulders; our shoulders sag forward, the sling finds its way on to the back of our necks; we feel half-suffocated. A twelve-stone man, rolled up in several blankets on a stretcher, is no mean load to carry, and on that very first trip we found that the job had little to do with the disciplined stretcher-bearing we had spent so many weary hours practising. We are automatons wound up and propelled by one fixed idea, the necessity of struggling forward. The form on the stretcher makes not a sound; the jolts, the shakings seem to have no effect on him. An injection of morphine has drawn the veil. Lucky for him.  

Stretcher-bearers changed – they worked in relays close to the front – but the stretcher remained the same.  Ideally the wounded soldier would remain on his stretcher only as far as the Casualty Clearing Station, from where used stretchers would be returned to dressing stations and aid posts by now empty ambulances.  

Twelve stretchers were supposed to be kept at every Regimental Aid Post, but supplies could easily run out.  When Major Sidney Greenfield was wounded, he remembered:

… the call ‘stretcher-bearers’, ‘stretcher-bearers’, the reply ‘No stretchers’. ‘Find one, it’s an officer.’

And it was not uncommon for those evacuated ‘in a rush’ to remain on their stretcher until the base hospital; and since ambulance trains heading to the coast were less urgent than troop trains and supply trains heading in the opposite direction the journey was usually a slow one.  If the nearest hospital turned out to be full, a not uncommon occurrence, the train would be sent on to the next available one, thus prolonging the journey still more.    

H.G. Hartnett recalled the sheer pleasure of finally being put to bed at the base hospital at Wimereux:

After being washed and changed into clean pyjamas I was lifted off the stretcher on which I had lain for five days and nights into a soft bed—between sheets.

The contrast, of course, was not only with the canvas stretcher but with sleeping in the trenches wrapped in a groundsheet.

Before the widespread introduction of the Thomas splint (above), ordinary or even improvised splints were used.  Here is Sister Kate Luard on board an ambulance train in October 1914:

The compound-fractured femurs were put up with rifles and pick-handles for splints, padded with bits of kilts and straw; nearly all the men had more than one wound – some had ten; one man with a huge compound fracture above the elbow had tied on a bit of string with a bullet in it as a tourniquet above the wound himself.

A fractured femur would turn out to be one of the most common injuries, described by Robert Jones as ‘the tragedy of the war’: if fractures were not properly splinted the soldier would arrive at the Casualty Clearing Station in a state of shock caused by excessive blood loss and pain:

‘These men required radical surgery to save their limbs and lives… Entry and exit wounds would have to be extended widely, removing all dead skin and fat… The bone ends of the femur at the fracture site would then have to be pulled out of the wound and be inspected directly [for loose fragments of bone, clothing and debris]… Wounded soldiers arriving at casualty clearing stations with a weak pulse and low blood pressure secondary to excess blood loss due to inadequately splinted fractures would be unlikely to survive the major procedure’ – let alone the amputations that were often administered.

Mortality rates in such circumstances were around 50 per cent. The Thomas splint was specifically designed to immobilise a fractured femur, and by April/May 1917 its use during the battle of Arras had reduced the mortality rate to 15 per cent, and far fewer men lost their legs: see Thomas Scotland, ‘Developments in orthopaedic surgery’, in Thomas Scotland and Stephen Heys (eds) War surgery 1914-1918.

Stretcher bearers were trained to apply the splint in the field, as in this case, but one senior officer made it clear that in any event it had to be applied no later than the Regimental Aid Post:

The Thomas thigh splint should be applied with the boot and trousers on, the latter being cut at the seam to enable the wound to be dressed. The method of obtaining extension by means of a triangular bandage has been sketched and circulated to all MOs in the Divn. After the splint is adjusted it should be suspended both at the foot and at the ring by two tapes at either end tied to the iron supports one of which is fitted to the stretcher opposite the foot and one opposite the hip.

More information on this truly vital innovation: P.M. Robinson and M. J. O’Meara, ‘The Thomas splint: its origins and use in trauma’, Journal of bone and joint surgery 91 (2009) 540-3: never in my wildest dreams did I imagine reading or referencing such a journal – but it is an excellent and thoroughly accessible account.  See for yourself here.

It was vital not to leave a tourniquet on for long.  Here is one RAMC officer, Captain Maberly Esler, recalling his service on the Somme in June 1915:

If a limb had been virtually shot off and they were bleeding profusely you could stop the whole thing by putting a tourniquet on, but you couldn’t keep it on longer than an hour without them losing the leg altogether. So it was necessary to get the field ambulance as soon as possible so they could ligature the vessels, and the quicker that was done the better.

Lt Col Henderson‘s pencilled notes on the treatment of the wounded (1916-16) urged stretcher bearers to make every effort to stop bleeding with a compress or bandage: ‘ A tourniquet should only be applied if this response fails and where a tourniquet is applied the [Regimental Medical Officer] should be at once informed on the arrival of the case at the [Regimental Aid Post].’  By May 1916 Medical Officers were being warned ‘against too frequent use of the tourniquet, on the grounds that the dreaded gas bacillus (perfringens) is most likely to thrive in closed tissues.’

A tourniquet could aggravate damaged tissues and did indeed increase the risk of gangrene; 80 per cent of those whose limbs had a tourniquet applied for more than three hours required amputation.

This was a major responsibility; sometimes the card was filled in at a Dressing Station, sometimes at the Casualty Clearing Station.  George Carter‘s diary entry for 31 August 1915 explains its importance:

‘My work consists of nailing every patient and getting his number, rank, name, initial, service, service in France, age, religion, battalion and company. That is usually fairly plain sailing, I find, but entails a certain amount of searching [extracting paybook or diary, for example] when a patient is too ill to be bothered with questions. Then I have to find out what is the matter with him, what treatment he has had, and what is going to be done with him… The reason for taking these particulars and making out forms is to prevent any man being lost sight of, whatever happens to him. If he finishes in England after taking a week on the journey, he has got all his partics on him, everywhere he has stopped, the RAMC have been able to see at a glance all about him and can turn up all about him if called on.’

But things could easily go awry.  Here is one young soldier, Henry Ogle:

I think it must have been here [at the CCS] that orderlies tied Casualty Labels on our top tunic buttons, and got mine wrong, though it may have been at Louvencourt or even Hébuterne. Wherever it had happened, it was here that I first noticed it and called the attention of an orderly to it. I had been wounded in the right calf by part of a rifle bullet which penetrated deeply and remained in but I had been labelled for superficial something or other, while Frank Wallsgrove was GSW for gunshot wound. I said, ‘Mine’s wrong, for we two were hit by the same bullet.’ ‘Can’t alter your label, chum. Anyhow it doesn’t matter. It’ll get proper attention.’ We were already being packed into a train so nothing could be done and I didn’t worry about it.

At the base hospital he tried again:

An orderly came along (it was then dark night) and threw a nightgown and a towel at me. ‘Bathroom. Down that passage. On the right. Any of them.’ ‘Don’t think I can get there. Can’t walk.’ ‘Let’s see your label.’ ‘Label’s wrong.’ ‘What do you know about that? Go on.’ ‘I know a bloody sight more about it than you do, chum, but I’ll see what I can do.’ It was not easy as the leg was quite out of action and my orderly friend had no time to watch…  On crawling back I found Frank tucked into bed. Our case-sheets were clipped to boards which hung on the wall behind our beds and, so far, the items from our tunic labels had been copied out on the case-sheets. The next morning the customary round of visits was made by the Medical Officer on duty with Matron and Sister of Ward and an orderly or two. I tried to explain that my label was wrong and Frank backed me up but we were simply ignored. My wound was dressed as a surface wound.

It was only after the swelling of his leg alarmed Matron that Henry was shipped off for an X-ray that revealed the need for an operation to remove the bullet.

‘T’ for anti-tetanus serum.  In the first weeks of the war tetanus threatened to become a serious problem: on 19 October 1915 Sister Kate Luard recorded ‘a great many deaths from tetanus’ in her diary, but two months later she was able to note ‘The anti-tetanus serum injection that every wounded man gets with his first dressing has done a great deal to keep the tetanus under.’  In A Surgeon in Khaki, published in 1915, Arthur Andersen Martin confirmed that ‘every man wounded in France or Flanders today gets an injection of this serum within twenty-four hours of the receipt of the wound’ – at least, if he had been recovered in that time – and ‘no deaths from tetanus have occurred since these measures were adopted.’

More information: Peter Cornelis Wever and Leo van Bergen, ‘Prevention of tetanus during the First World War’, Medical Humanities 38 (2012) 78-82.

Morphine was administered for pain relief, but it still awaits its medical-military historian (unless I’ve missed something).

This was Boyle’s anaesthetic apparatus, but before the widespread availability of these machines a variety of systems was in use and, in the heat of the moment, the administration of anaesthesia was often far removed from the clinical, calibrated procedures the machine made possible. Here is a chaplain who served at No 44 Casualty Clearing Station:

I spent most of my time giving anaesthetics. I had no right to be doing this, of course, but we were simply so rushed. We couldn’t get the wounded into the hospital quickly enough, and the journey from the battlefield was terrible for these poor lads. It was a question of operating as quickly as possible. If they had had to wait their turn in the normal way, until the surgeon was able to perform an operation with another doctor giving the anaesthetic, it would have been too late for many of them. As it was, many died.

The most fortunate patients were those who had little or no recollection of the procedure.  Here is H.G. Hartnett on his experience at No 15 Casualty Clearing Station (the second occasion he was wounded):

 I was destined for surgery and lay in agony on my stretcher until near 9.00 pm, when orderlies carried me into a brilliantly lit operating theatre. I was placed on the centre one of three operating tables where I lay watching doctors and nurses completing an operation on another patient only a few feet from where I lay. When my turn came my wound was uncovered and a doctor placed a mask over my face. Then he asked me the name of the colonel of my battalion as he administered the anaesthetic. I remember no more about the operation or the theatre. When I returned to brief consciousness about 4.00 am the next morning I was lying on a stretcher on the ground in a large canvas marquee, in the third position on my side of it. Others had been carried in during the night, all from the operating theatre. The fumes of the anaesthetic from their clothes and blankets continued to put us off to sleep again. The day was well advanced when I finally returned to full consciousness.  

In the early years of the war anaesthesia was not a recognised speciality – and chloroform was the most widely used agent – but as the tide of wounded surged, operative care became more demanding and Casualty Clearing Stations assumed an increasing operative load so it became necessary to refine both its application and the skills of those who administered it.   In the British Army advances in anaesthesia were pioneered by Captain Geoffrey Marshall at No 17 Casualty Clearing Station at Remy Siding near Ypres from 1915.  By then nitrous oxide and oxygen were commonly used for short operations (which did not mean they were minor: they included guillotine amputations) but longer procedures typically relied on chloroform and ether.  A crucial disadvantage of chloroform was that it lowered blood pressure in patients who had often already lost a lot of blood.  ‘If chloroform be used,’ Marshall warned, ‘the patient’s condition will deteriorate during the administration, and he will not rally afterwards.’  And while ether would often produce an improvement during the operation, this was typically temporary: ‘the after-collapse [would be] more profound and more often fatal.’   His achievement was to show that a combination of nitrous oxide, oxygen and ether significantly improved survival rates for complex procedures – from 10 per cent to 75 per cent for leg amputations – and to have a machine made to regulate the combination of the three agents.  His design was copied and modified by Captain Henry Boyle, whose name became attached to the device.  

More information: Geoffrey Marshall, ‘The administration of anaesthetics at the front’, in British medicine in the war, 1914-1917; N.H. Metcalfe, ‘The effect of the First World War (1914-1918) on the development of British anaesthesia’, European Journal of Anaesthesiology 24 (2007) 649-57; E. Ann Robertson, ‘Anaesthesia, shock and resuscitation’, in Thomas Scotland and Steven Heys (eds) War surgery, 1914-1918.

Bovril was advertised in all these ways; the company used a sketch of the Gallipoli campaign to claim that Bovril would ‘give strength to win’ and that it was a ‘bodybuilder of astonishing power’.  In 1916 the company even published an extract from a letter purported to come from the Western Front, accompanied by an image of an RAMC Field Ambulance tending a wounded soldier: 

But for a plentiful supply of Bovril I don’t know what we should have done.  During Neuve Chapelle and other engagements we had big cauldrons going over log fires, and as we collected and brought in the wounded we gave each man a good drink of hot Bovril and I cannot tell you how grateful they were.

Oxo seems to have been less popular, and least for any supposed medicinal or restorative properties, but it was often sent to soldiers by their families at home.  One advertising campaign enjoined them to ‘be sure to send Oxo’, and in one ad a Tommy writes home to say that when he returned to his billet to find the parcel, ‘the first thing I did was to make a cup of OXO and I and my chums declared on the spot this cup of OXO was the best drink we had ever tasted.’  

The image shows a surgeon using a fluoroscope to locate the fragments of the bullet:

An early Crookes x-ray tube visible under the table emits a beam of x-rays vertically through the patient’s body. The surgeon wears a large fluoroscope on his face, a screen coated with a fluorescent chemical such as calcium tungstate which glows when x-rays strike it. The x-ray image of the patient’s body appears on the screen, with the bullet fragments appearing dark.

The ‘partner’ referred to was the Hirtz compass (visible on the left of the image).  According to one standard military-medical history:

The essential feature of the H[i]rtz compass is the possibility of adjustment of the movable legs that support the instrument, so that when resting on fixed marks on the body of the patient the foreign body will be at the center of asphere, a meridian arc of which is carried by the compass. This arc is capable of adjustment in any position about a central axis. An indicating rod passes through a slider attached to the movable arc in such a way as to coincide in all positions with a radius of the sphere, and whether it actually reaches the center or not it is always directed toward that point. If its movement to the center of the sphere is obstructed by the body of the patient, the amount it lacks of reaching the center will be the depth of the projectile in the direction indicated by the pointer.

The value of the compass lies in its wide possibility as a surgical guide, in that it does not confine the attention of  the surgeon to a single point marked on the skin, with a possible uncertainty as to the direction in which he should proceed in order to reach the projectile, but gives him a wide latitude of approach and explicit information as to depth in a direction of his own selection.

The compass built on Gaston Contremoulins‘ attempts at ‘radiographic stereotaxis’; it could usually locate foreign objects to within 1-2 mm: much more than you could possibly want here.

The reassuring scientificity of all this is tempered by a cautionary observation from a wounded officer, Major Sidney Greenfield, who was X-rayed at a Casualty Clearing Station: 

My next recollection was the x-ray machine and two young fellows who were operating it. Apparently the operator had been killed the previous night by a bomb on the site and these two were standing in with little or no experience of an x-ray machine. Their conversation was far from encouraging and was roughly like this: ‘Now we have got to find where it is … is it this knob?’ ‘No.’ ‘Try that one.’ ‘Try turning that one.’ ‘No, that doesn’t seem to be right.’ ‘Ah, There it is.’ ‘Where’s the pencil. We must mark where it is. Now we have to find out how deep it is.’ After some time they seemed to be satisfied. In my condition and knowing little about electrical machines such as x-ray I wondered whether I should be electrocuted and was more relaxed when I was taken back to bed.

Incidentally, X-rays were called Roentgen rays (after the scientist Wilhelm Roentgen who discovered them in 1895) but the British antipathy towards all things German saw them re-named ‘X-rays’ from 1915: Alexander MacDonald, ‘X-Rays during the Great War’, in Thomas Scotland and Steven Heys (eds) War surgery, 1914-1918.

In addition to these terse communications, nurses and chaplains usually wrote to relatives on behalf of their patients. It was seen as a sacred duty, but it often seemed to be a never-ending task.  On 1 August 1917 Sister Kate Luard confided in her diary: ‘I don’t see how the “break-the-news” letters are going to be written, because the moment for sitting down literally never comes from 7 a.m. to midnight.’  In the case shown here, Sister Kathleen Mary Latham had written to Lt Hopkins’s wife on 12 November 1917 from a Casualty Clearing Station to say that

‘your husband has been brought to this hospital with wounds of the legs, arms, hand and face.  He has had an operation and is going on well. Unfortunately it was found necessary to remove the left eye as it was badly damaged, but he can see with the other though the lid is swollen and he cannot use it yet.  No bones are broken.  It will not be advisable for you to write to this address as he will probably be going on to the base in a day or two.’

The telegram from the War Office is dated three days later, by which time Hopkins had reached the base hospital at Le Touquet.  Sister Latham’s earlier account of her work at Casualty Clearing Station No. 3 at Poperinghe in 1915 is here.

***

In Durham, Louise Amoore pressed me on the anthropomorphism that seems inescapable in a narrative like this; it worries me too (I’ve always been leery of Bruno Latour‘s Aramis for that very reason).  I tried removing the ‘I’ and substituting an ‘it’ but I found doing so destroyed both the operative agency of the objects and, perhaps more important, the transient, enforced intimacy between them and the soldier’s body.  That intimacy was more than physical, I think.  I’ve already cited the reassurance provided by the prick of a needle, the whiteness of a new bandage; but the mundanity of objects could also be disorientating, intensifying an already intense sur-reality.  Here, for example, is Gabriel Chevallier recalling the moment when he and his comrades went over the top:

The feeling of being suddenly naked, the feeling that there is nothing to protect you. A rumbling vastness, a dark ocean with waves of earth and fire, chemical clouds that suffocate. Through it can be seen ordinary, everyday objects, a rifle, a mess tin, ammunition belts, a fence post, inexplicable presences in this zone of unreality.

Aramis also alerted me to another, and perhaps even more debilitating dilemma: a latent functionalism in which everything that is pressed into service works to carry the soldier through the evacuation chain.  That seems unavoidable in a narrative whose telos is precisely the base hospital and Blighty beyond.  Yet we know that, for all the Taylorist efficiency that was supposed to orchestrate the evacuation system in this profoundly industrial war, in many cases the chain was broken, another life was lost or permanently, devastatingly transformed.  As you can see, I’ve tried to do something about that with some of the objects I’ve selected.

I’ll probably add more objects: this is very much a work in progress, and I’m not sure where it will go – so as always, I’d welcome any constructive comments or suggestions.  Any written version would involve longer descriptions, I think, and would probably dispense with most of the scaffolding of notes I’ve erected here (though some of it could and probably should be incorporated into the descriptions).

Empire, faith and war

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My time in the archives at the Imperial War Museum this summer was very productive and I made considerable headway in completing my work on casualty evacuation from the Western Front in the First World War and from North Africa in the Second – more on that later.  In the letters and diaries written from Belgium and France I found many, scattered references to the presence of non-Caucasian troops, especially from North Africa and India; as I’ve noted before, it was not all white on the Western Front.

 

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But apart from the heroic work of scholars like Santanu Das there have been few attempts to piece these fragments together.  I’ve now discovered a website, Empire, Faith and War, that aims to put the contribution of Sikhs literally on the map (though it’s much more than an exercise in cartography):

As the world turns its attention to the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18, the ‘Empire, Faith & War’ project aims to commemorate the remarkable but largely forgotten contribution and experiences of the Sikhs during this epochal period in world history.

From the blood-soaked trenches of the Somme and Gallipoli, to the deserts and heat of Africa and the Middle East, Sikhs fought and died alongside their British, Indian and Commonwealth counterparts to serve the greater good, gaining commendations and a reputation as fearsome and fearless soldiers.

Although accounting for less than 2% of the population of British India at the time, Sikhs made up more than 20% of the British Indian Army at the outbreak of hostilities. They and their comrades in arms proved to be critical in the early months of the fighting on the Western Front, helping save the allies from an early and ignominious defeat.

Wartime generations and their stories fading fast, and current and future generations losing vital links to this monumental past.

There’s probably not a single Sikh in the UK who doesn’t have a military connection in their family history. It is often because of those links to the armies of the British Raj that many Sikhs now reside in the UK.

And yet the role of Sikhs in World War One is a largely unknown aspect of the Allied war effort and indeed of the British story.

By revealing these untold stories we aim to help shed much needed light on both their sacrifice, but also on the contribution of all of the non-white allied forces from across the British Empire.

This is possibly our last opportunity to discover and record the stories of how one of the world’s smaller communities played such a disproportionately large role in the ‘war to end all wars’.

Apoorva Sripathi has a good account of the background to the project here.

The things they carried

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I’ve drawn attention to Thom Atkinson‘s brilliant documentation of ‘the things they carried’ – the equipment carried by infantry into battle from 1066 to 2014 – several times before (here and here): see his Soldiers’ Inventories here.

He’s now returned to the theme with a new portfolio comparing the kit issued to soldiers from Britain (above), France, Germany (below), Russia and the United States during the First World War.  You can access the images, plus a commentary from Christopher Howse, here.

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Industrialised war

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Bombs falling on Montmedy and marshalling yards

As I work on the text of “Reach from the Sky”, I’ve been revisiting the role of Edward Steichen in the development (in fact, the industrialisation) of air photography on the Western Front.  As I noted, all too briefly, in ‘Gabriel’s map’ (DOWNLOADS tab), Steichen commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces. He organised the 55 officers and 1,111 men under his command into what Paul Virilio described as ‘a factory-style output of war information’ that ‘fitted perfectly with the statistical tendencies of this first great military-industrial conflict’.

Steichen 5th Photographic section at work on Western Front

The classic source on Steichen’s assembly-line methods of reproduction (and much more) is Allen Sekula‘s essay, ‘The instrumental image: Steichen at war’, in Artforum 14 (1975) 26-35 [see also the image above]:

The establishment of this method of production grew out of demands for resolution, volume, and immediacy. No method of reproduction but direct printing from the original negative would hold the detail necessary for reconnaissance purposes. Large numbers of prints from a single negative had to be made for distribution throughout the hierarchy of command. In addition, the information in prints dated very rapidly. Under these circumstances, efficiency depended on a thorough-going division of labor and a virtually continuous speedup of the work process. Printers worked in unventilated, makeshift darkrooms; 20 workers might produce as many as 1,500 prints in an hour, working 16-hour shifts.

Analytically the essay has never been surpassed, but now there is a new book that fills in the biographical details of Steichen’s service during the First World War: Von Hardesty‘s Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War (Cambridge, 2016):

Von Hardesty Camera AloftEdward Steichen (1879–1973) played a key role in the development of photography in the twentieth century. He is well known for his varied career as an artist, a celebrated photographer, and museum curator. However, Steichen is less known for his pivotal role in shaping America’s first experiments in aerial photography as a tool for intelligence gathering in what may be called his “lost years.” In Camera Aloft, Von Hardesty tells how Steichen volunteered in 1917 to serve in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). He rose rapidly in the ranks of the Air Service, emerging as Chief of Air Photography during the dramatic final offensives of the war. His photo sections were responsible for the rapid processing of aerial images gained through the daily and hazardous sorties over the front and in the enemy rear areas. What emerged in the eighteen months of his active service was a new template for modern aerial reconnaissance. The aerial camera, as with new weapons such as the machine gun, the tank, and the airplane, profoundly transformed modern warfare.

Here is the table of contents:

Foreword: taking the camera aloft
1. War and exile
2. A new life in the military
3. Over there
4. The world of air observation
5. Taking charge
6. Over the front
7. War and photography
Appendix: life at the cutting edge: the photo sections.

The book includes stunning reproductions of photographs (from which I’ve borrowed the annotated image of the Photographic Section above): you can see a selection from the book here.  Other Steichen aerial imagery from the period is here and here.

As you’ll be able to see when I’m finished, I’m no less interested in Steichen’s work during the Second World War, and in particular the various photographic projects he directed in the Pacific that captured – and celebrated – the masculinism and homosociality of modern war (here the work of Horace Bristol is especially revealing).

But right now it’s the industrialisation of aerial imagery that is capturing my attention.  It’s a commonplace that the First World War was industrial warfare on the grand scale, of course, but often our attention is distracted by the killing machines and mechanisms themselves – the gas, the tanks, the aircraft – and we lose sight of the assembly-line logic that animated the slaughter not only during but also before and after.

LOBLEY Reception of wounded at 1st CCS, Le Chateau October 1918

You can see it in Steichen’s production line, but there are countless other examples.  Last summer I was working in the Friends’ Library in London, recovering the role of the Quakers in providing medical care on the Western Front as part of my research on casualty evacuation, when I encountered this extraordinary passage that speaks directly to the relentless motion of the killing machine (see also my ‘Divisions of Life’ here).  It’s a medical orderly’s account of loading an ambulance train, written some time in 1915:

Down in a hedged field at the end of the straggling mining village lies the casualty clearing station, some two-score large tents… Since midday the [casualty] clearing station has been full to overflowing, but still an endless line of motor ambulances moves down along the crowded road from the fighting line, through the village and into the muddy field. It is night now, starless and dark as pitch, and a lashing rain is driven hard in your face before a bitter and rising wind; but still the cars are discharging their pitiful loads in dreary succession when the train is brought into the siding which serves this desolate little camp.

day2day-amb2

From the train itself you can scarcely see anything of the clearing station tonight; only the headlights of the cars as they turn in through the gate, and a few hurricane lamps flickering here and there. Near one end of the train, at the wooden footbridge which crosses the stream separating the camp from the railway track, there stands a powerful acetylene flare, casting a circle of vivid light on the deep mud of the path. Save for three or four feeble oil-lamps on the ground beside the long darkened train, this is the only light at the loading place. A few moments of uncertain waiting, and the first stretcher comes down, its weary bearers slithering and stumbling in the watery mire. As you watch the flare you see them emerge suddenly from the utter blackness beyond into the fierce glare of the light; they halt for a moment, while a cloaked officer standing on the bridge raises the waterproof sheet which protects the wounded man’s face from the beating rain; a name is given and noted; the covering is dropped over the head, and the bearers move on again, seeing to vanish as if by magic as they pass with their burden out of the light into the enveloping blackness. A pause, another stretcher enters the circle of light; the same words pass, the same motions, and it too move son, blotted out as suddenly as it appeared. Watching this time after time, you feel as if a picture were being cast on a screen and flashed off, over and over again: for there is something cruelly mechanical about it all.

(c) Rosenstiel's; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Divisions of Life

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Journeys from No Man's Land.001

My main presentation at the AAG in Chicago was part of a session organised by Noam Leshem and Alasdair Pinkerton on Remnants of No Man’s Land: history, theory and excess (more on their larger project here).  Here is an extended summary of what I had to say, together with some of my slides, but bear in mind that this all had to be done in 20 minutes so there wasn’t much room for nuance.  Neither was there time to discuss civilian entanglements, both volunteers and victims, nor the sick: the presentation focuses on the wounded, even though the problems of trench foot, ‘trench flu’, and a host of other diseases were also extremely important.  They do all receive attention in the larger project from which this is extracted.  One last, geographical qualification: my discussion is limited to the evacuation of British and imperial troops from the Western Front.

My starting-point was the strange disappearance of the wounded from the field of battle.  As John Keegan wrote in The Face of Battle, in most histories the ‘wounded apparently dematerialize as soon as they are struck down’; he was writing specifically about General Sir William Napier’s account of the battle of Albuera in 1811, but the point is a sharp one that can be enlisted as part of a more general critique of military history.

In the case of the First World War, the emphasis on those who lost their lives – on the dead not the wounded – derives not only from the sheer scale of the slaughter but also from the enduring landscape of memorialisation and commemoration.  When John McCrae‘s elegaic poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ is recited every Remembrance Day – ‘In Flanders fields the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row’ – it is all too easy to forget that he wrote those lines not only to commemorate the death of a close friend but that he did so at Essex Farm Advanced Dressing Station:

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What lies behind those haunting lines – and that medical outpost – is a vast canvas of wounded men, which Christopher Nevinson captured as ‘The Harvest of Battle’ (below).  The dead occupy the foreground, but behind them is the endless, moving panorama of the wounded whose precarious journeys took most of them far beyond ‘No Man’s Land’.

(c) IWM (Imperial War Museums); Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

In fact, as Emily Mayhew reminds us, ‘being wounded was one of the most common experiences of the Great War’: on the Western Front, she writes, ‘almost every other British soldier could expect to become a casualty’.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, for the first six months of the war the British Expeditionary Force was unprepared for the scale of casualties, and even with the help of civilian volunteers and aid societies – Nevinson briefly served as a medical orderly with the Friends Ambulance Unit, for example – the remarkably long time it took to evacuate the wounded combined with the perilous nature of their improvised journeys to increase the mortality rate.

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And so what Mark Harrison called the military-medical machine had to be speeded up – and moved closer to the field of battle.

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Before every major offensive elaborate plans for medical support were prepared: casualties were ‘cleared’ down the line as far and as fast as possible to make room for the newly injured, casualty clearing hospitals moved closer to the line, ambulances and stretcher-bearers made ready, and ‘down’ trenches designated for the efficient removal of the wounded (below).

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Soldiers wounded in ‘No Man’s Land’ – a term never recognised by the British General Staff, who insisted that they controlled the field of battle right up to the enemy front lines – were often immobilised and disoriented; some crawled into shell holes, seeking refuge below the field of fire, but it could take hours, even days before they were discovered and rescued (I’ll devote a later post to a detailed discussion of some of those cases).

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Sometimes their mates came to their rescue, sometimes the regimental stretcher bearers.  But they too had to find their way through a dangerous and devastated terrain, often with no landmarks to guide them and on occasion made virtually impassable by the thick, cloying mud that was always –  disconcertingly – much more than mud.

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By now, they were in the care of the Royal Army Medical Corps’s Field Ambulance, and their first objective was an Advanced Dressing Station.  

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Treatment at ADS 1917

Those that needed anything beyond simple treatment or emergency surgery were sent on by horse or motor ambulance to a Casualty Clearing Station (a field hospital).

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It was usually here that their first surgeries took place.  The journalist Philip Gibb was shown around a CCS at Corbie and the experience haunted him for years:

After a visit there I had to wipe cold sweat from my forehead, and found myself trembling in a queer way. It was the medical officer—a colonel—who called it that name. “This is our Butcher’s Shop,” he said, cheerily. “Come and have a look at my cases. They’re the worst possible; stomach wounds, compound fractures, and all that. We lop off limbs here all day long, and all night. You’ve no idea!”

CCS Corbie

I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The M.O. could not understand my reluctance to see his show. He put it down to my desire to save his time—and explained that he was going the rounds and would take it as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded weakly, and cursed myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued, what men are brave enough to suffer I ought to have the courage to see… I saw and sickened. These were the victims of “Victory” and the red fruit of war’s harvest-fields. A new batch of “cases” had just arrived. More were being brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the floor-boards. The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their blankets back, and now and then felt a man’s pulse. Most of them were unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin was already darkening to the death-tint, which is not white. They were all plastered with a gray clay and this mud on their faces was, in some cases, mixed with thick clots of blood, making a hard incrustation from scalp to chin. “That fellow won’t last long,” said the M. O., rising from a stretcher. “Hardly a heart-beat left in him. Sure to die on the operating-table if he gets as far as that… Step back against the wall a minute, will you?” We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while ambulance-men brought in a line of stretchers. No sound came from most of those bundles under the blankets, but from one came a long, agonizing wail, the cry of an animal in torture. “Come through the wards,” said the colonel. “They’re pretty bright, though we could do with more space and light.” In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed lay a young British soldier, or part of a young British soldier. There was not much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to the thigh, and both his arms to the shoulder-blades. “Remarkable man, that,” said the colonel. “Simply refuses to die. His vitality is so tremendous that it is putting up a terrific fight against mortality… There’s another case of the same kind; one leg gone and the other going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in. ‘You’re not going to kill me, doctor,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stick it through.’ What spirit, eh?”…

“Bound to come off,” said the doctor as we passed to another bed. “Gas gangrene. That’s the thing that does us down.” In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been lopped of limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them unconscious, some of them strangely and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes as though staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged nearer. “Yes,” said the M. O., “they look bad, some of ’em, but youth is on their side. I dare say seventy-five per cent. will get through. If it wasn’t for gas gangrene—“

He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling at the nurse who felt his pulse. “Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn’t he? But we shall have to cut higher up. The gas again. I’m afraid he’ll be dead before to-morrow. Come into the operating-theater. It’s very well equipped.”

By now the bureaucratic machine had been activated: labels had been attached to the wounded and field medical cards (‘tickets’) completed; telegrams had been sent to advise families, and nurses had often written letters home on their patients’ behalf.

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The next stage for the most seriously wounded was evacuation by ambulance train to  a base hospital on the French coast.  There was a considerable bureaucracy involved in planning these movements, but for all the neatness and symmetry of the organisational diagrams – part of Clausewitz‘s ‘paper war’ – there were all sorts of delays.

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Priority was given to trains rushing reinforcements, supplies and ammunition to the front, and ambulance trains were frequently marooned in sidings waiting for them to pass so that journeys that might have taken hours could take days.  It was not uncommon for an ambulance train to arrive at a base hospital to find that there was little or no room for new patients and all but the most grievous cases had to travel on to the next.

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Journeys from No Man's Land.042

Many patients were treated at the base hospitals, but those with more serious wounds were evacuated by hospital ship to Britain.  This stage of the journey was no less dangerous than the previous one: as the war continued, there was an increasing danger of mines and submarines in the Channel.

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A distinctive  geography of the wounded emerged.  If they arrived at Southampton, the most critical cases were taken by train straight to the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, which treated as many as 50,000 patients during the war.  According to Lyn McDonald,

 ‘Those who could not be accommodated, and those who were seriously wounded but likely to survive a longer journey, were sent on by train to Birmingham, Bristol, Exeter, Leicester, Norwich and Plymouth.  But seven out of every ten hospital trains were directed to London, and during the first days of the Somme they rolled in almost every hour to Charing Cross and Paddington stations.’

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This is, of course, a highly abbreviated account of the casualty evacuation chain, and in the larger project from which this is derived I provide many more details.  But I think I’ve said enough to show that the chain was, in effect, a production line with an elaborate division of labour (again, in the larger study I show how class – or more accurately, rank – gender and race segmented the chain in various ways).  Indeed, in The Politics of Wounds Ana Carden-Coyne argues that what she calls ‘the Taylorist approach in modern war’ – and remember that this was industrial war on the grand (guignol) scale – ‘was particularly evident in the assembly-line style of evacuation and triage.’

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This prompts two concluding observations.

First, what was the instrumental logic that animated the evacuation chain?  After all, it was an expensive undertaking, as Arthur Empey (himself wounded on the Western Front) realised in this re-calculation of the chain:

It may sound heartless and inhuman, but it is a fact, nevertheless, that from a military stand-point it is better for a man to be killed than wounded.

EmpeyIf a man is killed he is buried, and the responsibility of the government ceases, excepting for the fact that his people receive a pension. But if a man is wounded it takes three men from the firing line, the wounded man and two men to carry him to the rear to the advanced first-aid post. Here he is attended by a doctor, perhaps assisted by two R.A.M.C. men. Then he is put into a motor ambulance, manned by a crew of two or three. At the field hospital, where he generally goes under an anaesthetic, either to have his wounds cleaned or to be operated on, he requires the services of about three to five persons. From this point another ambulance ride impresses more men in his service, and then at the ambulance train, another corps of doctors, R.A.M.C. men, Red Cross nurses, and the train’s crew. From the train he enters the base hospital or Casualty Clearing Station, where a good-sized corps of doctors, nurses, etc., are kept busy. Another ambulance journey is next in order — this time to the hospital ship. He crosses the Channel, arrives in Blighty — more ambulances and perhaps a ride for five hours on an English Red Cross train with its crew of Red Cross workers, and at last he reaches the hospital. Generally he stays from two to six months, or longer, in this hospital. From here he is sent to a convalescent home for six weeks.

If by wounds he is unfitted for further service, he is discharged, given a pension, or committed to a Soldiers’ Home for the rest of his life, — and still the expense piles up. When you realize that all the ambulances, trains, and ships, not to mention the man-power, used in transporting a wounded man, could be used for supplies, ammunition, and reinforcements for the troops at the front, it will not appear strange that from a strictly military standpoint, a dead man is sometimes better than a live one (if wounded).

Hence, for example, the orders recorded by A.M. Burrage:

The instructions given to stretcher-bearers are rather harsh. “ If you find two men wounded, and can take only one away, take away the one more likely to make a fit soldier again.” Therefore the one more urgently in need of attention must be left to die, because he would walk with a limp and would never again be able to carry a pack. Sound business, of course, but just a little hard.

Kate Luard captured another dimension of this when she wrote in January 1915:

‘The ambulance trains do so much bringing the British Army from the field that I hope some other  trains are busy bringing the British Army to the field, or there can’t be many left in the field…’

And Emily Mayhew provides this bleak vignette from a medical orderly that captures the seemingly insatiable drive of industrial war:

An ordinary train, similar to the one that had brought him to the front, was at one end unloading reinforcements, while at the other end it was filling up with wounded men.

The logic, then, was one of ‘salvage’; four out of every five men wounded on the Western Front were returned to the fighting, which was the over-riding objective of the military-medical machine.

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Second, the division of labour was also a division of life: the dead from the wounded, the dying from the ‘salvageable’, and the wounded from the unwounded or yet-to-be-wounded.  The last was not the least.  For breaching that separation could have the most unsettling consequences of all:

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Journeys from No Man's Land.058

 ***

What started me on this journey was Emily Mayhew‘s brilliantly conceived Wounded and an excellent series of articles by Martin Bricknell in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps: see in particular here.

You can also find more on the casualty evacuation chain from the Western Front at Beyond the Trenches here and here, the Long, Long Trail here, the Medical Front here, and the Royal Army Medical Corps site here.

My larger project examines the evacuation of casualties, combatant and civilian, from four combat zones 1914-2014: the Western Front during the First World War, the deserts of North Africa during the Second World War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

Journeys from No Man’s Land

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Stretcher-bearers

I’ve agreed to join a panel organised by Noam Leshem on Remnants of No Man’s Land: history, theory and excess at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago next April (I imagine this is a follow-up to the session at the RGS/IBG in September).

The no-man’s lands of the First World War were never limited to the killing fields between the trenches. Their impact was never fully confined by the time and space of the battles: it lingered on the bodies of soldiers, in contaminated ecologies and in the radically altered post-war intellectual landscape. The violence that is unleashed in the no-man’s land and the destruction it wrought does not result in emptiness, in a terra nullius, but in excess that can never be fully contained.

This session invites additional reflections on the excessive quality of no-man’s land: its materialities, ecologies, cultural expressions and political-ideological articulations. It aims to deepen the theoretical import and conceptual power of ‘no-man’s land’, and move beyond its use as merely a convenient colloquialism. Similarly, we seek to engagements with other histories of no-man’s lands that are not solely confined to the Western Front during WWI.

LOBLEY Dugouts in the embankment near Le Cateau

Despite that last sentence, this is what I’ve come up with; these abstracts are always promissory notes, of course, written so far in advance that they can provide little real indication of what eventually transpires.  Fortunately we are now no longer lumbered with the Yellow Pages-style book of abstracts so I doubt anybody will actually read this on the day.  But here goes:

Journeys From No Man’s Land, 1914-1918

During the First World War on the Western Front a central logistical preoccupation of military planners was the deployment of troops to the front line and the evacuation of casualties from the battlefield. These priorities were closely connected – the aim was to provide medical treatment as close to the site of the wound as possible so that troops could be returned expeditiously to the line – but they also often confounded one another as hospital trains headed for the coast were shunted into sidings to allow troop trains to move up. In this presentation I address three questions. First, what it was possible to know about the ‘lie of the land’, particularly in the deadly spaces between the front-line trenches? Here I focus on the connections between aerial reconnaissance, night patrols and trench maps. A second question concerns the arrangements made in advance of major offensives – the disposition of stretcher bearers and aid posts, field ambulances and casualty clearing stations – and the ways in which these visible geometries of the medical-military machine affected the sensibilities of soldiers waiting to go ‘over the top’. Finally, how did the wounded apprehend and navigate No Man’s Land, and how did they make what Emily Mayhew calls their precarious journeys away from the fighting?

There’ll be more posts on this as I circle in towards the presentation.  It’s part of my new research project which explores military-medical machines and the casualties of war 1914-2014, but which is now widening to include other aspects of medical care in contemporary conflict zones like Gaza and Iraq/Syria and the militarisation of medical intervention in West Africa.