Contribution
It is my solemn duty to break to right hon. and hon. Members that “Blackadder Goes Forth” is not a documentary. As we recall the charnel house that was the first day of the Somme, we must consider the reality and not the fiction that today surrounds the generation who suffered and sacrificed so much in the great war. To truly understand what our forefathers went through, we should look to great works such as “Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front” by the late Professor Richard Holmes. I was lucky enough to meet the professor, famous for his “War Walks” television series, during my own minor attempts to study military history. He told me that the two biggest barriers to earnest study of the first world war were the war poets—although he conceded that their testimony was valid, since they served—and “Blackadder Goes Forth”.
Those final frames of “Blackadder” captured the awful reality of death on an industrial scale—but showing every private soldier to be an economic conscript, every officer a public school toff and every general ensconced in a chateau far behind the lines? It simply was not like that. Take every public schoolboy and there still would not be enough numbers to officer the giant British Army on the western front alone. While
“‘Forward!’ he cried from the rear
And the front rank died”
is a lovely line from Pink Floyd, the “lions led by donkeys” narrative, which is set in stone today, is really a canard from the 1970s.
The creeping barrage on the first day of the Somme campaign, with the shells falling just ahead of our advancing infantry, was a failure. There is no disguising it, but it was a genuine attempt to change the tactics of a war of attrition and to give advancing infantrymen the edge in an era where technology had outpaced tactics. Our troops moved more slowly than expected, and co-ordination with the artillery in the infancy of battlefield radio communications was difficult. As we have heard, the shells failed to cut the wire in front of the German trenches, whose deep dugouts proved devastatingly effective.
General Douglas Haig would carry the can for the failure of the Somme to deliver the hoped-for decisive breakthrough, yet “the Chief”, as he was known, remained popular with his men. The reality is that the British were hard-pressed for experienced troops and matériel. Haig’s strained relationships with David Lloyd George meant that his reputation was tarnished, perhaps deliberately, as Lloyd George sought to insulate himself from blame for the Somme’s failure and the awful toll of dead and wounded. The two men observed an uneasy truce in the immediate aftermath of the armistice, and it was only after Haig’s death that Lloyd George launched his political assassination in his multi-volume war memoirs. He accused Haig of a lack of vision and flexibility, and blamed him for the “ghastly slaughter”. It was odd, though, that the Welsh wizard kept his counsel and did not depose Haig at the material time as the war raged.
None of that takes away from the huge sacrifice of British and empire troops throughout a war that spanned the globe. Perhaps the saddest aspect is that today we seem unable to answer the question of what it was all for. Ask the French. Ask the Belgians. They were invaded, and there is no whitewashing the atrocities committed against civilians by the Germans in 1914. The great war was then a war of liberation.
I leave the final word not to British generals, but to one American and one Prussian. William Sherman’s march to the sea in the American civil war saw him unleash total war on civilians. He said, “War is all hell, boys”, and, “you cannot refine it.” That is a truism echoing through human history, but what of the hellish Somme? General Erich Ludendorff, whose doctrine of an elastic, flexible defence cost us so very dear, said in his autobiography, “My War Memories”:
“As a result, we were completely exhausted on the Western Front”.
We paid a high price in blood and treasure, and while not a victory, the Somme did pave the way to ultimate triumph.