The Battle for Berlin, Ontario: An Historical Drama

TWO: How to Raise a Battalion

TWO How to Raise a Battalion As often as not a stupid war is greeted with mindless euphoria and a necessary one with soberness and regret. World War I was such a war, and the universal delight with which it opened was heightened by the conviction that the whole picnic wouldn't last long anyway. For the Allies it was "business as usual," and "We'll be home before Christmas," and in Punch the cartoon rogue requested His Lordship to put him away for six months or the duration of the war. For the beautifully efficient German war machine it was going to be even shorter. In and out of Paris in about two weeks, and mop up the rest of Europe in maybe six more. Unfortunately, everybody had got hold of the wrong timetable , and as early as the first winter it was clear that a very different sort of campaign was taking shape. Instead of swift troop movements by train and truck, plus scintillating cavalry charges hither and yon, trenches began to be dug, and then trenches to support trenches, and then yet more trenches to support these. Next it was a question of gift-wrapping all the trenches in barbed wire, destroying every tree, bush, and blade of grass in sight, and finally waiting for the rain to fall. Which it did in copious amounts. Soon there was an incredible network of soggy ditch and dripping wire stretching all the way from the English Channel in the north to the Vosges Mountains in the south, and here the armies came to a halt. It was stasis in the mud. And for the next four years a generation of young men, urged on by their leaders, slowly wiped each other out in the most horrifying war the world had yet seen. 18 How to Raise a Battalion 19 In the circumstances it was not surprising that bellicosity, in all its simplistic dullness, soon turned into more interesting emotional mixtures, particularly for the soldiers at the Front— cynicism, helplessness, fortitude, terror, joy, and hilarity all rolled into one—and that by the first Christmas, when the troops from both sides walked into No Man's Land to exchange gifts with each other, the songs of the army were beginning to reflect the new spirit. The old, patriotic tub-thumpers of earlier wars such as, We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too, had had their words changed to I don't want to fight, I'll be slaughtered if I do. I'll change my togs, I'll sell my kit and pop my rifle too, while even that most popular marching song of them all not only challenged the foot slogger to pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and stop worrying, it also exhorted him, with suspicious frequency, to smile—no less than seven times in each chorus . And by that first Christmas, too, it was patently obvious that hundreds of thousands more Private Perks would have to be issued with old kit bags than had originally been estimated. The pre-war, professional army of 100,000 men that had constituted the British Expeditionary Force had been decimated, as had the first infusion of volunteers, and this was not surprising when one considers that the aggressive German army consisted of over 4,000,000 well-trained men. Indeed, it was only French stubbornness, Russian belligerence, and human error that had saved the day. Inevitably the cry was for more and more men to feed the monster, whose appetite for human flesh was beginning to seem insatiable. ByOctober of 1915 the official British casualties stood at 493,294, and without a doubt the other participants in the "ever popular War Game" could claim that their own scores were every bit as good, In England, the original target of six divisions, which most warlords had assumed would be sufficient for the task ahead, was revised upwards. To 70 divisions. This meant more serious recruiting methods (conscription didn't become law until May 1916), which in turn meant dusting off those noble techniques of persuasion that emphasized blandishment and moral blackmail . In the publicity campaign that ensued, the mother country 20 The Battlefor Berlin was fortunate to possess a superb recruiting sergeant in its secretary of state...