First World War continues to fascinate and appal

Tours of the battlefields and war cemeteries are more popular than they have ever been, the poetry of the Great War continues to be studied by many schools and recent novels such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Sebastian Faulks Birdsong are set during the conflict.

Even the final series of Blackadder chose the trenches of the Western Front as its setting.

RC Sherrif’s play Journey’s End, which is set in the trenches, opens in Malvern on Wednesday February 9 before going on a national tour.

To find out more about the real history behind the drama I visited some of the battlefields in France with an expert guide, Steve Cocks, a former history teacher with a long standing interest in the First World War.

The abiding image of the First World War is of two sides in deadlock, facing each other across No- Man’s land, launching repeated attacks resulting in massive casualties and little gain.

“Whilst there is truth in this image, the reality was much more complicated,” explained Steve, who organises tours to the battlefields.

During a trip that took in Vimy Ridge, the French national cemetery Notre Dame de Lorette, Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery and the Loos Memorial he talked about the reasons for the deadlock and the mind-numbing casualties. While 5,000 or 20,000 or 100,000 killed is hard to picture it is sobering to stand in the middle of a cemetery where thousands of crosses, stretching in endless lines, give at least some indication of what the figures mean.

At Vimy Ridge, a piece of high ground fiercely contested throughout the war, we saw the Canadian National Vimy Memorial that serves as a place of commemoration for all the Canadian soldiers who died in France and have no known grave.

Nearby the grounds are still a honeycomb of wartime tunnels, trenches and craters and unexploded munitions from a war now almost a century past. This First World War ordnance still kills a handful of people every year.

It is possible to enter some of the tunnels and to walk in a section of preserved trench and to view a strange expanse of now grassy craters, permanent changes to the landscape, caused by enormous explosions from artillery shells and explosives laid underground by both the British and the Germans.

Steve explained that one reason for the deadlock and the high casualty rate was the technical development of weapons that gave a massive advantage to defenders. Machine guns could fire a hail of bullets at attacking infantry and above all soldiers attacking in the open were exposed to artillery fire, the range and effectiveness of which had increased hugely by 1914.

“Troops concentrated ready for an assault were obvious targets for artillery and soldiers crossing No Man’s Land often had to pass through a wall of high explosive and shrapnel,” he said, adding that as the war progressed both sides went underground into trenches, dug outs bunkers and tunnels, like those we toured at Vimy Ridge.

Another reason for the deadlock was the inability of commanders to control events once an attack began. Telephone lines were cut by shellfire and runners regularly wounded or killed. During a major assault the life expectancy of a runner was around three days.

Aircraft were used for ariel observation but without a portable radio communication system getting information back to commanders was slow and unreliable.

“This meant once a battle began there was no way to know whether it had succeeded, where to send extra men, whether to call a halt,” said Steve.

On a number of occasions there were successes where the German line was breached and the enemy’s frontline trenches captured. But the success ended here. With commanders unaware of where the attack had gone well reserve troops could not be sent to the right place at the right time.

“Contrary to popular myth many senior commanders were killed as a result of going forward in an attempt to gain information and control events,” said Steve.

Another reason for the deadlock was that both sides were evenly matched and could call upon a seemingly endless supply of men and supplies. It was the first modern industrial war and each side mobilised tens of millions and produced previously undreamed of quantities of weapons to replenish losses on the Western Front. It became a war of attrition or a wearing out fight.

As we visited the cemetery at Caberet Rouge, where there are 7,655 burials from the Great War, nearly 4,500 of which are unidentified soldiers, and the Loos Memorial, which commemorates 20,000 officers and men who fell in battle in that part of France and have no known grave, the human cost of that wearing out fight is all too evident.

It is the sheer unimaginable scale of these losses that overwhelm our perceptions of the war. History generally remembers the slaughter at Verdun, on The Somme and at Passchendaele and yet the equally costly battles in the final months of victory in 1918 are less well known. That these battles resulted in victory is also so often forgotten.

Journey’s End is set in the final year of the war and is based on R C Sherrif’s own experiences as a soldier on the Western Front. It does not glorify war but neither is it an anti war play. It is in the word’s of it’s director David Grindley a play about “ordinary men in extra-ordinary circumstances” and about the courage and humour that sustained them in the face of certain tragedy.