To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [162]
Haig finally called a halt to the fighting in November 1917 after his soldiers seized a last piece of ground less than five miles from where they had started in July. More than 15,000 Canadians were killed or wounded in the concluding spasm of combat to capture the village of Passchendaele—which had been scheduled to be taken on the fourth day of the offensive, months before. It was such a patently meaningless sacrifice that, raging about it afterward at a meeting in London, Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden strode up to Lloyd George, seized his lapels, and shook him.
In the sanitizing language of newspapers and memorial services, these Canadians, and all the British Empire troops who lost their lives in the three-and-a-half-month battle, were referred to as the "fallen." But in the mud of Passchendaele, falling dead from a bullet wound was only for the lucky: "A party of 'A' Company men passing up to the front line found ... a man bogged to above the knees," remembered Major C. A. Bill of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. "The united efforts of four of them, with rifles beneath his armpits, made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, would be impossible, for there was no foothold. Duty compelled them to move on up to the line, and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched fellow was still there; but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad."
Early gas masks, here worn by Russian officers.
Practicing for the great cavalry charge that never came.
The British government's 1914–1918 propaganda campaign, much of it secretly financed and the work of supposedly independent civic groups, was the largest and most sophisticated the world had yet seen.
A still from the documentary film The Battle of
the Somme: a soldier carries a dying comrade.
Passchendaele, the battle that cost British forces more than
260,000 dead and wounded: the first day, July 31, 1917 (below),
September (opposite top), October (opposite bottom).
Stephen Hobhouse: from Eton and
Oxford to solitary confinement.
Joseph Stones: shot at dawn.
Albert Rochester, radical in uniform: Why
should each officer have a personal servant?
A family of show-trial martyrs. From right: Alice Wheeldon,
her daughters Winnie and Hettie, a prison wardress.
John S. Clark: from circus animal tamer
to underground antiwar activist.
What generals on both sides feared: pacifists (at Dartmoor, Devon, above) and
fraternizing soldiers (Russians and Germans on the Eastern Front, below).
19. PLEASE DON'T DIE
As DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION, John Buchan oversaw the expansion of the most sophisticated propaganda operation the world had yet seen. It produced a torrent of patriotic materials, including paintings and drawings by special war artists sent to the front, pictorial magazines, boys' adventure stories portraying the Germans as bloodthirsty barbarians, cards for cigarette packs, and a "German Crimes Calendar" with a new atrocity for each month. Telegrams put an upbeat twist on the latest war news for the press at home and abroad. One bureau turned out leaflets dropped from balloons over the German trenches. Lecturers were dispatched everywhere, from industrial districts in England threatened by the influence of antiwar radicals to the United States—where speakers were instructed to avoid the touchy subject of Ireland. Every American Catholic priest found himself receiving a monthly letter of war news from a supposedly independent committee of Catholics in Britain. American editors, reporters, and congressmen were welcomed on their arrival in London by a new Anglo-American Society Buchan started, and could enjoy VIP tours of the front in France while housed in a nearby château. Like his patron Milner, Buchan welcomed the colonies and dominions to the great struggle, and saw to it that films poured out with titles like Canadians on the Western Front and New Zealand Troops in France. One short film in 1917 even celebrated the black work battalions sent from South Africa;