The Great Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

Telegraph
war correspondent Philip Gibbs noted a growing realisation that the situation was ‘more complex than the old simplicity, a sense of revolt against sacrifice unequally shed and devoted to a purpose which was not that for which they had been called to fight’. There were 57,470 British casualties on 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, a third of whom died of their wounds.
    Officers would delve surreptitiously into leather travelling cases, to find the small pot of rouge with which to brighten their cheeks and disguise from young men who looked to them for confident leadership the paleness of fear that washed across their own faces. The young soldiers had lumbered towards the front line, carrying what was known as ‘The Soldier’s Christmas Tree’. Bent double under the weight of cartridge pouches, water bottle, gas helmet, entrenching tool, bayonet, groundsheet, overcoat, underclothes, socks, precious letters and cherished photographs, each man tried to make headway through the incessant rain and deep, inhibiting mud. Boots slipped off in the sludge, leaving their bare feet, in the poet Wilfred Owen’s phrase, ‘blood-shod’.
    Over the course of those twenty weeks 125,000 British soldiers were killed, most of them so young that in the words of 22-year-old Violet Keppel, who herself had lost so many friends, they had only led ‘half-smoked lives’. A junior officer on the front line wasunlikely to survive longer than six weeks. Friends picked up parts of bodies that were no larger than a Sunday roast, gathered them together and buried them as best they could beneath the chaotic surface of the muddy fields, before returning to the slaughter. Confidence in political and military leadership dwindled. In a 1917 London pantomime two farmers sitting under a chestnut tree were hit by a falling chestnut each time they told a lie. When one remarked that Lloyd George was predicting an imminent end to the war, the audience smiled wearily as the entire contents of the tree erupted, bombarding the stage with nuts.
    Faith in the classically noble utterances of the classically beautiful Rupert Brooke was shattered. Patriotism had become smudged. Sentiments that expressed the belief that this war was essential if you loved England were shown to be lies. Disillusionment was commonplace in conversation among fighting men, and poets at the front began to reflect the shift in feeling as the war showed no sign of ending.
    Fifteen years before Brooke had written of a far away but always patriotic meadow, Thomas Hardy had described in more realistic terms the loneliness of a young soldier, Drummer Hodge. ‘Fresh from his Wessex home’, Hodge had been killed in the Boer War, his body lying ‘uncoffined’ for ever under ‘strange-eyed constellations’. Here was an unromantic battlefield, one that was no outpost of indestructible Englishness, but one that was instead a lonely, alien and abandoned place. The patriotic sentiments of Rupert Brooke’s verses now seemed poignantly misplaced. In poems such as Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ the truth came directly from the voices and experiences of the soldiers themselves.
I knew a simple soldier boy
     
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
     
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
     
And whistled early with the lark.
     
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
     
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
     
He put a bullet through his brain.
     
No one spoke of him again.
     
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
     
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
     
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
     
The hell where youth and laughter go.
     
    Danger was everywhere, as the noise of the guns gave way to the silent and suffocating arrival of gas. Early German experiments with chemical warfare in the form of poison gas had become refined. The first, thick pus-green cloud of chlorine gas had drifted towards the front line at Ypres in 1915 and by the