Blame The Top Brass

One of the more singular aspects of what I would call loosely the standard or traditional British narrative of the First World War has been its sombre focus on casualty rates and, more particularly, on those killed or missing in action - the war dead.  Any visitor to the Western Front today cannot fail to note the acres of beautifully laid out tombstones, in graveyards big and small, devoted to the hundreds of thousands of British military personnel who gave their lives in the Great War. You might well say that this is a thoroughly appropriate subject to be sombre about. And so it is - except that Britain's preoccupation with this aspect, notable in its historiography of the war and its ritual commemorations (Remembrance Sunday), is an outlier among the major combatant nations that fought the conflict, even though its casualty rates were far smaller than those incurred by France, Germany, Austro-Hungary, or Russia. Reliable casualty figures for the First World War are notoriously difficult to assess - for one thing, revolutions took place in four of the warring nations in 1918, making the accounting of war losses a low priority. However, the generally accepted casualty figures we have for the different major combatants show a startling divergence from the British rate, which lies well down the scale. So if we look at total casualties (that is, killed, wounded and missing) as a percentage of a nation's mobilised forces in the course of the war, Russia had an extraordinary 76.3%, followed closely by France at 73.3%. Germany's casualties amounted to almost 65% while Austro-Hungary suffered a staggering 90% loss (including 1.2 million dead and 3.62 million wounded). By contrast, Britain (or, more precisely, its bigger incarnation, the British Empire) came behind Italy (39.1%) at 35.8%: of this figure, it's estimated that British Army deaths stood at over 673,000 by 1918, with an additional 1,643,469 wounded. No one can say that any of these statistics are anything but grim - but why, historically, have British narratives of WW1 devoted so much to the country's dead (as a reflection of 'the waste of it all' thesis), and accordingly sought to apportion blame among its generals ('Butcher' Haig et al) in a way that none of its wartime allies or enemies has done, despite their perhaps having a greater reason for doing so? Historians have offered a number of explanations. One is that the British army which fought so bloodily from the Somme onwards was made up of volunteers, a citizens' army in which Pals battalions featured strongly: their disproportionate losses left whole streets and towns back home decimated, producing a profound and lasting trauma. Another explanation is that Tommies and their officers died en masse far away from home in a foreign field: it became government policy not to repatriate their bodies (there were simply too many), if indeed their bodies were still intact (tens of thousands of the missing were simply blown apart by shell fire). This created a national outpouring of emotion and grief (not to say a widespread resort to spiritualism for comfort), which led to the setting up of the (very British) Imperial War Graves Commission in order to lay the dead to rest where they fell - and where, importantly, their graves could be visited after the war by their loved ones. But these reasons must apply as much to the other combatant countries as to Britain: from the outset they had conscripted armies, it's true, but so did Britain from January 1916, when compulsory service was introduced. In any case, a conscripted army is still one recruited from civilians. The real reason, I think, is that sending a mass army beyond Britain's shores was simply unprecedented in its history up to that point. Previously, British armies fighting on the continent had been small and largely professional, mainly because British policy had traditionally been to rely on its large navy to protect its overseas interests, supporting the much bigger land armies of its foreign allies with hefty subsidies instead of manpower (as in the Napoleonic Wars). By contrast, by 1918 the British Army could field 70 divisions and had reached a maximum strength of almost 4 million men. Even so, at any one time Britain's army still remained smaller than those of its main allies and enemies. All the same, to Brits such a massive exodus of their menfolk (plus a significant number of women serving in auxiliary medical and nursing units) must have seemed deeply shocking, all the more so when so many never returned. European and Russian populations would have grieved just as much for their losses, but most of these countries had experienced a constant cycle of war and occupation throughout their history (France and Prussia had invaded each other as recently as 1870, with the Prussians soon taking Paris). This was not the case with island Britain, so proud of its long history of resisting invasion. But the First World War was a new kind of war, forcing the British to fight in a way they had never had to before: much higher casualties were unavoidable as a result.

British soldiers of the East Yorkshire regiment smile at the camera as they make their way up to the Somme front, 3 July, 1916. Two days earlier - though these men probably didn't know it - the British army had suffered some 57,000 casualties (over 19,000 of them killed), the worst single day in its history. By the end of the Somme campaign four and a half months later, British casualties had reached 420,000.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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