1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [20]
Pullovers, socks and mufflers were welcome enough, but what the Army needed most, and needed urgently, was sandbags. They had given up trying to dig trenches across the worst of the morass; now they were building breastworks instead, filling sandbags with earth – more often mud! – and building high protective walls with crude shanties behind for shelter and redoubts in front for protection. They needed sandbags by the thousand, by the million, and appeals went out to churches and work-groups to supply them.
Sewing sandbags was hard labour, and working with rough canvas not unlike sewing mailbags, but the women of Britain set to and turned them out by the million. Before Easter the Surrey village of Newdigate alone had sent off 1,665. But while such industry was laudable and the country was enthusiastically doing its bit, it was doing little to speed the progress of the war and it seemed to some who were in a position to take an informed, objective view that the war was proceeding in a way that was too dilatory by half and that there was an unforgivable complacency in high places.
One was Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the other was David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer. By coincidence, and without consultation, the two men had spent the days between Christmas and New Year putting their misgivings on paper. On New Year’s Day both memoranda were distributed to members of the Cabinet. In their assessment of the situation they were surprisingly similar. Lloyd George, who had recently visited France, dwelt on the apparently leisurely approach to the war and begged that the War Cabinet might meet regularly every few days rather than at intervals of two weeks or longer. He deplored the lack of policy, and criticised the generals who seemed to him to be so flummoxed by the Germans’ decision to dig in that they could think of no apparent means to break the deadlock.
In Sir Maurice Hankey’s memorandum he turned his mind to practical means by which the deadlock could be broken. Victories were needed to encourage the people at home. How were they to be achieved?
He incorporated a list of ideas. Numbers of large, heavy rollers propelled by motor engines to roll down the barbed wire by sheer weight; bullet-proof shields or armour; smoke balls to be thrown by the troops towards the enemy’s trenches to screen their advance; rockets throwing a rope with a grapnel attached to grip the barbed wire ‘which can then be hauled in by the troops in the trench from which the rocket is thrown’; spring catapults, or special pumping apparatus to throw oil or petrol into the enemy’s trenches. He had privately gone so far as to have some prototypes made and tested.
But the results of Hankey’s experiments had not found favour
with either the military commanders in the field or the military hierarchy at the War Office, and so far as the War Office was concerned they already had their hands full with the mammoth task of organising three hundred thousand volunteers and supervising the million and one details that would lick them into shape and turn an amorphous mass of civilians into something that approximated to an army. They were already being inundated with bright ideas from would-be inventors, but there was simply no time to give them serious consideration and, as Hankey sadly remarked, The bright ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not bright.’ The commanders in the field had other things on their minds than the invention of unconventional new weapons. They would have been more than happy to have a sufficient supply of the old ones, and Sir John French was already confiding his disquietude to his diary:
23.1.15 There is more delay