Life in Ireland During World War I

Poster from Loyalists Opposing Home Rule

Ireland in Turmoil

There was much turmoil in Ireland as the First World War approached. Labor strife was particularly evident in late 1913. The Dublin lock-out was a major industrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place in that city. The lock-out affected tens of thousands of Dublin families.The dispute, lasting from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the dispute was the workers' right to unionise. Although the workers organizations had been broken, he principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. No future employer would ever try to "break" a union in Ireland. 

When World War I began in 1914, there was another festering crisis in Ireland over  Home Rule—a political movement from 1870 to 1922 that aimed to grant Ireland domestic control over its own affairs, such as education, health, and agriculture, within the United Kingdom. Unionists (opposed) and nationalists  (pro-home rule) were on the verge of civil war. Both sides stopped their campaigning for and against Home Rule and supported the British war effort. Ulster Protestants joined the British Army to show their patriotism. In return they expected to remain part of the United Kingdom when the war was over. Edward Carson insisted the Protestant Ulstermen be kept together in one unit. His request was granted and approximately 9,000 men from Ulster formed the 36th (Ulster) Division.

The nationalists hoped for Home Rule as gratitude at the end of the war. The nationalists were not allowed to form a division of their own like the Ulstermen. Not everyone in Ireland agreed with fighting for Britain. Arthur Griffith of Sinn Féin said, "Ireland is not at war with Germany. The only duty we have is to stand for Ireland’s interests." There was a banner in front of Liberty Hall in Dublin saying, "We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland."

Up-Scale Dublin Suburb Rathmines, 
Early 20th Century

1914 was the year after the Dublin Lockout and there was tension in the city. Some nationalists were busy planning a rebellion, seeing England’s difficulty as Ireland’s opportunity. There was also a sense that many people were happy with British rule. In 1911, King George V visited Dublin and thousands lined the streets to view his arrival. Many of the professional people who came out to see him had grown in political importance. Grand houses in places like Fitzwilliam Square were home to leading lawyers, businessmen and civil servants.

As well as that, during the 19th century, the wealthy began moving to suburbs such as Blackrock, Monkstown, and Rathmines. They built their lives around golf clubs, tennis clubs, yachting, and sailing. Houses were run with the help of servants who often lived in. Trams, horses and bicycles dominated transport, but cars were growing in importance.

Slums and poverty 

The former homes of the wealthy, especially on the north-side of the city, became home to thousands of the city’s poorest. These houses became known as tenements. Dublin’s slums were among the worst in Europe with thousands of manual and unskilled workers living in terrible conditions. A third of families lived in one room and in one case, five families were living in one large room.

The slums were disease-ridden and the death rate in Dublin at that time was 75 percent higher than in any British city. Those who had work worked very long hours for low wages. 

Employment

A Guinness Barge on the River Liffey

There was no major industrial area in Ireland at that time except in north-east Ulster. Dublin’s employment depended on administration and commerce. Dublin Port was busy with many British goods imported into the country and the bulk of agricultural goods leaving through Dublin for foreign markets. Up to seven cattle boats a day left Dublin for England. Work in the port, construction and administration could not absorb the huge number of available workers.

Good jobs with employers such as Guinness were dreamed of, but were not a  reality for most people. Employment in Cork centered around the major breweries such as Murphy’s and Beamish and Crawford.  People living in the county depended on agriculture and fishing. Galway was a county in decline with a birth - rate below the average and no industrial base. Waterford was equally poor with evictions of families from their homes commonplace. It was a mainly rural county with only Dungarvan and Waterford City having a population greater the 2,000. Belfast was booming due to the shipyards, the linen mills and associated industries.

Irish Soldiers at War

Men of the 36th Ulster Division, 1917

The conflict saw over 200,000 Irishmen join the British forces. Official estimates put the number of Irish dead at about 35,000. The vast majority died in their prime on French and Belgian battlefields. World War I wiped out an entire generation of young men. The war was fought on a huge scale and the armies were vast with millions of conscripts. The Irish came from every Irish county and many villages and towns. Men from the working classes joined in vast numbers. Farmers prospered during the war due to price increases and there was little prospect of them joining. The numbers joining up slackened off after the Eastern Rising. Many Irish people joined English, Scottish, and Welsh regiments. Emigrants joined the armies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the United States. In addition, women served as nurses at the front line.  They signed up for different reasons:

• Some enlisted to escape poverty.

• Others to maintain family honour or traditions.

• Others joined for adventure.

• Others wanted to stop German aggression.

• Many joined because they believed it would ensure Home Rule after the war and others joined to prevent Home Rule.

Women Working in the National Shell Factory,
Parkgate Street, Dublin

The war affected Irish life in other ways. Agricultural prices increased as the war went on due to the demand for food to feed the huge British Army. Middle and upper-class women in Ireland as in other countries took up new roles. They worked as nurses or in charity work in support of war victims. Many women worked in munitions factories also. As the war continued, life began to improve in Dublin. Living standards rose and mortality rates fell with money flowing into the tenements in separation payments to soldiers’ wives. Every woman whose husband was at the front got an allowance collected at the post office. The army provided a new source of steady income for the vast number of unemployed, unskilled workers.

Main Street, Longford, Ireland, in the early 1900s

Home Rule and the Easter Rising

The outbreak of World War I may have postponed another war in Ireland. Moderate nationalist leader John Redmond of the Irish Parliamentary Party had achieved Home Rule with the Liberals agreeing to introduce it. Ulster Unionists, led by Edward Carson, rejected Home Rule and formed the Ulster Volunteer Force, a 90,000 strong well-armed force which intended to fight to prevent it. Nationalists founded the Irish Volunteers to support Home Rule.

In September 1914, Redmond urged nationalists to enlist and fight for Britain in the war. Two days before his speech, Home Rule was granted but it was not to be enacted until the war was over. Some of the Irish Volunteers who refused to support Britain planned a rebellion. They were joined by the Irish Citizen Army in staging a rising at Easter 1916. Redmond saw the rebellion as a ‘German intrigue’ and Carson saw the leaders as traitors. Both men urged caution in the treatment of the leaders and prisoners when the rising ended. The British authorities ignored Redmond and Carson and after the execution of the leaders, public opinion rejected moderate nationalism in favour of militant republicanism. The Irish Parliamentary Party continued to push for Home Rule, but the British authorities did not grant it. In the 1918 general election, the people switched to Sinn Féin and Home Rule was no longer an option.

Constance Markiewicz,  Co-Organizer of the
1916 Easter Rebellion
(See our article on the Easter Rising's 100th Anniversary HERE)

World War I, the Home Rule campaign, and the Easter Rising changed life in Ireland for decades to come. 

Excerpted from: World War I—The Great War; from the County Longford, Ireland, Library

Aftermath: By 1932 There Was a Growing Fear for the Future in Britain

It was over airpower!

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

[After the Great War], those making bold claims for airpower, [especially Italy's Giulio Douhet, America's Billy Mitchell, and Great Britain's Hugh Trenchard] gained degrees of legitimacy for a variety of reasons. The war had indicated that technological advancement could take place in a highly telescoped way. Many observers thus concluded that the technological development of air power would be fast and relentless—and offensive capabilities would outstrip defensive ones. Moreover, many assumed that some of the most daunting weapons of the war, including chemicals and gas, would be teamed with airpower. (Tami Davis Biddle, U.S. Army War College.)

One of the most important consciousness-raising attempts by politicians about the terrible realities of air warfare came in the speech by the Conservative leader Sir Stanley Baldwin to the House of Commons in 1932. Baldwin pointed out that no town was safe: "The question is: whose morale will be shattered quickest by that preliminary bombing?" Baldwin was content to ram home his point that rapidly evolving aircraft technology was a threat in and of itself: "I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through."

Source: The Blitz Companion

The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War by Robert Sackville-West

 

From The Times, 19 September 2021

Robert Sackville-West’s new book is compelling and often horrifying. His subject is the First World War and its aftermath. The “searchers” of his title were initially the bereaved, who tried to get news of their lost loved ones (Where and how did they die? Were they perhaps taken prisoner and still alive?) by interviewing their surviving comrades, often in hospitals and casualty clearing stations. In the early months of the fighting you needed money—and courage—to cross the Channel and pursue your search in the war zone. Rudyard Kipling and his wife were there, looking for their son, John, killed at the Battle of Loos. So, too, was Lord Robert Cecil with his sister-in-law, Violet Cecil, looking for her son who, like John Kipling, was an 18-year-old second lieutenant in the Guards. . .

Throughout the 1920s hundreds of thousands of visitors made pilgrimages to the battlefields, and Thomas Cook and other travel companies ran tours. Many were shocked by the post-apocalyptic landscapes, still littered with the debris of war. The ghoulish work of exhumation and reburial was still going on, and there were moments of horror. One woman picked up a discarded boot as a souvenir, only to find there were human bones still in it. It seems, though, from Sackville-West’s closing pages, that the devout far outnumbered the sensation-seekers. Some mothers brought little bags of earth from home to sprinkle on their sons’ graves. But the many whose sons or husbands had no known grave had to be content with making a lead-pencil tracing of their name on the list of the lost, which they would take home and treasure. These are among the many images that linger in the mind from Sackville-West’s remarkable book.

Order HERE

D-Day, H-Hour for the Blue Ridge Division at the Meuse-Argonne

The 80th Division Moving into Opening Position

The assault on September 26 surprised the Germans and disrupted their defense, but this situation was only momentary. From that day on the fighting was probably unsurpassed during the World War for dogged determination on both sides. Each foot of ground was stubbornly contested and the hostile troops took advantage of every available spot from which to pour enfilade and crossfire into the advancing American troops.

American Armies and Battlefields in Europe

Shoulder Patch, 80th Blue Ridge Division 

By Major Gary Schreckengost, U.S. Army, Ret.

Lt. Otto Leinhauser, the son of German immigrants from Philadelphia, PA, and a platoon leader in the division's 313th Machine Gun Battalion remembered the preparations:

At Midnight the artillery opened up and such a night you never saw. We are opposite south of Béthincourt. The horizon, as far as you could see, was just one blaze or continuous line of flashes of every caliber, and the war was terrific. This continued until 0530. when the barrage started, and the infantry left the trench. Just multiply all that racket by about ten and then add more and you will have just the noise the artillery made. Our machine guns, of which there were 120, all opened up at 5:30 A.M. and then hell was let loose. You couldn't hear yourself think.

This epic opening bombardment was fired over a 20-mile front. Some 3,200 French and American artillery pieces delivered a rain of steel upon the German lines—far more than the German artillery preparation for Operation MICHAEL, the early-spring offensive that was to end the war before the Americans arrived in force. As the artillery roared, at 0330 hrs., the battalion commanders read the following message from General Cronkhite to their company commanders:

To the Members of the 80th Division: For over a year we have been learning how to fight. Within the next few hours, we shall have a chance to apply what we have learned. We form part of a vast army, consisting of over 300,000 Americans and an equal number of our French Allies. No enemy can withstand you, men from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. You are fighting for everything that makes life worth living, the safeguarding of your families and homes, and that personal liberty so dearly earned and so tenaciously maintained for over a century. Go at them with a yell, and regardless of obstacles or fatigue, accomplish your mission. Make the enemy know that the 80th Division is on the map: make him know, when he faces you in the future, that resistance is useless.

80th Division at H-Hour, 26 September 1918

At 0430 26 Sept, "H-hour-minus-one," just as the drizzle grew into light rain, sappers from the 305th Engineers, reinforced by soldiers from the reserve battalions of the 160th Infantry Brig. began by crawling forward into "no man's land" through the rusty metal briar patch and into the corpse-lain swamp that had separated the French and the Germans for almost a year now, with wire cutters, picks, and shovels, marking infiltration paths with white engineer tape for the infantry to follow at daylight. They were covered by the artillery, which was still firing interdiction, harassing, or counter-battery barrages north of the Béthincourt-Forges Road.

With the 75s now firing a standing barrage north of the creek, the Gas Regiment laying clouds of masking smoke, and the 155s and machine guns firing interdiction barrages on known or suspected Hun mortar or artillery batteries miles behind the front line, Majors O'Bear and Holt, the respective commanders of the lead attack battalions of the 319th and 320th Infantry blew their whistles to advance. They were echoed by the company commanders and the platoon leaders, who were all holding Browning .45 caliber automatic pistols over their heads and yelling either, "Over the top lads! Over the top!" (just like their British brethren and trainers had done in Picardy) or "Up and At "Em!" which was the American handle and the men climbed from Trenches (or Tranchées) "Alsace" and "Kovel" and advanced into the Forges bottomlands.

The Division's First Obstacle: Forges Creek

Eyewitness: Marching to Jerusalem

Turkish Defenders Around Gaza Were Well Equipped 
with Machine Guns

 

By H.P. Bonser, Royal Engineers

After a spell in the Signal School at Cleopatra Camp, I was drafted to the 74th Divisional Signal Company which was then being formed. My first experience of war was at the Second Battle of Gaza when we were in reserve.

It was a nightmare of interminable marching, thirst, and tiredness. On the third day of this commotion, I was on a cable wagon which was picking up a line in order to lay it again wherever needed.

September of this year (1917) found us on the borders of Palestine. The chief hardship was lack of water—a good wash was a luxury. Our final preparations for the advance took place in a sandstorm. For three days we were working with goggles over our eyes and handkerchiefs round mouth and nostrils.

The job was recovering and loading cable ready for the dash up. It was impossible to see a man 20 yards away; there was sand all over our perspiring bodies, sand on every mouthful of food we ate, and a sip of tepid water left sand on our lips. Half the fellows were suffering from dysentery pains and passing blood.

The storm ceased, and we had a clear and beautiful night. We washed, and we stretched ourselves under the stars utterly content with just the absence of physical discomfort. I have had the same feeling in miniature when a tooth has stopped aching. The noise of the bombardment added a pleasurable touch of excitement. We felt things were afoot.

Morning saw us setting off in earnest. Curiously enough, it was the drivers who suffered most from the sand, and it was a job getting men well enough to sit the horses.

My pal and I found ourselves riding in an eight-horse cable team. It was an exciting ride. Straight down the side of a wady and top speed at the opposite bank before the momentum was spent.

Destroyed British Tank at Gaza

About midday we clattered through Gaza, an untidy dilapidated Gaza from which most men had fled. Here and there a dark face peeped stealthily from a doorway, but, apart from the troops hurrying through, it was a place of desolation.

Yet I felt an indescribable sense of elation riding through this town heaped with the debris of war; an elation akin to those lines of Macaulay's about the thick, black cloud of smoke going up from a conquered town; an elation that seemed to have no basis in reason.

North of Gaza we off-saddled for a meal. We found a patch of grass on which both men and beast rolled for pure enjoyment. While we were eating a man and woman came trudging along the way. They were of village Bedawi type and looked hard-pressed. They sat down as though waiting for any leavings. The woman had a baby.

My pal and I had a half tin of condensed milk, and we slipped over casually, and soon had the baby sucking it off biscuit. The man grinned and nodded when we gave him the rest of the tin, but the woman looked at us without saying a word. Although she was Mohammedan, she made no attempt to draw her veil. She just looked at us. I don't think we fitted in with her notion of invading soldiers.

We trekked northwards, rigging up signal offices wherever we stopped until we settled down in the Wady Surar as a transmitting office to the divisions.

It was a mud and misery winter. Supply lorries were stuck fast in the mud, and supplies often scarce. Our Christmas Day ration was two biscuits, a tin of bully to four, and a tin of jam to seventeen men. We were sleeping in wet clothes, and even sleep was scarce, as pressure of work in the signal office necessitated us working all through every alternate night. I had the additional misery of neuralgia.

Three telegrams I handled that winter stick in my memory. One from General Allenby to the 60th Divisional General when Jerusalem was taken.

It read "Congratulations. Psalm 122, v. 2". I looked it up. "Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem." I thought it rather decent of Allenby.

Men of the EEF at the Lions' Gate, Jerusalem

The other two struck me by their contrast to one another.  One wet and shivery night I handled a telegram from a G.H.Q. general asking for his hot-water bottle to be collected from Fast's Hotel, Jerusalem, and forwarded by despatch rider, as the nights were chilly.  The next telegram was from 163rd Brigade reporting how many men had died of exposure during the last twenty-four hours.

Source: A Sapper at War, H.P. Bonser, Royal Engineers

"Oh! How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning" – A World War One Music Video

 

      Oh! How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning,

      Oh! How I'd love to remain in bed

      For the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call:

      'You've got to get up, you've got to get up,

      You've got to get up this morning!'

      Someday I'm going to murder the bugler

      Someday they're going to find him dead

      I'll amputate his reveille and stomp upon it heavily

      And spend the rest of my life in bed!

Commentary from the Library of Congress

Already a well-known songwriter when the war began, Irving Berlin, himself an immigrant whose family came from Siberia, was drafted into the U.S. Army in early 1918 and assigned to Camp Upton, located in Yaphank, Long Island, New York. There Berlin wrote a Ziegfeld-style revue featuring a cast of soldiers called Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which helped raise money to construct a camp community center. "Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," one of the show's hit tunes, expressed Berlin's distress over early morning reveille. Earlier it had been introduced by Eddie Cantor in the Ziegfeld Follies.

 

 Bonus Selection:I simply could not find a video of Eddie Cantor singing "Oh! How I Hate," but I remember watching Eddie singing this one on TV when I was a kid.  MH

Eugene Debs: Presidential Candidate and Wartime Criminal

Eugene Victor Debs (1855–1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. In the fateful presidential election of 1912, Debs won 901,1551 votes, which was six percent of the ballots cast.

Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for his antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, on 16 June 1918. The prosecution of Debs was only one part of the massive repression of dissent during World War I directed at anti-war activists. In that speech, Debs made no reference to the war or President Woodrow Wilson’s conduct of the war. He confined his remarks to a general socialist critique of war as a product of capitalism. Nonetheless, he was convicted. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and ten-year prison sentence in Debs v. United States (10 March 1919).

Former Presidential Candidate Eugene Debs Leaving
the White House after His Pardon by President Harding

President Woodrow Wilson rejected pleas to pardon Debs after the war ended. Debs was ill while in prison, but ran for president in 1920 on the Socialist Party ticket, receiving almost the same number of votes as in 1912. 

On Christmas Day 1921, President Warren G. Harding pardoned him on the condition that he would get to meet Debs at the White House. Harding greeted him by saying, “I have heard so damned much about you.” Later in the day, Debs was greeted by many well-wishers at Union Station where he took the train home to Terre Haute, Indiana.

Debs spent his remaining days trying to recover his health, which was severely undermined by prison confinement. He made several speeches, wrote many articles, and finally in 1926 went to Lindlahr Sanitarium just outside of Chicago, where he died on 20 October 1926. His body was brought back to Terre Haute where it lay in state in the Terre Haute Central Labor Temple.

Sources: The Eugene Debs Foundation; Today in Civil Liberties History

Remembering a Veteran: Dr. Elsie Dalyell, OBE, Balkan Front Bacteriologist

Dr. Dalyell Before the War

By James Patton

Elsie Jean Dalyell (1881–1948), a pathologist, was born on 13 December 1881 at Newtown, Sydney, the second daughter of mining engineer James M. Dalyell and Jean, (née McGregor). Elsie was educated at Sydney Girls' High School, after which in 1897 she was hired by the Department of Public Instruction as a pupil-teacher. Sponsored by the Department, she completed the first year in arts and science at the University of Sydney but had to withdraw in 1905 due to a medical emergency. She recovered and left teaching, transferring to second-year medicine at the Women's College at Sydney, where in 1909 she received a Bachelor of Medicine (M.B.) with first-class honours, and then a Master of Surgery (Ch.M.) in 1910. 

Elsie was one of the first female resident medical officers at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, then served as a demonstrator in pathology—the first female on the full-time staff of the medical school. In 1912, she won the Beit Fellowship, becoming the first woman to earn this distinction in Australia. With this bursary, she was able to study pediatric gastroenteritis at the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine in London.

She was caught up in the patriotic fervor of 1914 and joined Lady Wimborne's Serbian Relief Fund unit. She went to Skopje (Uskub) in Macedonia to help with the 1915 typhus and relapsing fever pandemic, which killed an estimated 150,000 people, including about 36 percent of the treating doctors. 

Skopje at the Time of the Great War

In Skopje, Elsie worked in the fever hospital, more than one mile from the town's main hospital. She wrote of her experience at some length:

Our building was meant for a barracks, but was hastily utilised for a hospital. The dining room is a clean bare cellar with a table and the inevitable packing cases as chairs. My own room (the last doctor in it had typhus) contains my bed, a packing case... my cabin trunk and a canvas chair. We have no sitting-room... I have over one hundred patients who suffer from every imaginable fever – typhus, typhoid, scarlet, diphtheria, and a dozen others not yet classified. The suffering of the sick and wounded and the appalling waste of life here are beyond description, but the hospitals are getting typhus under control. 

Four of our staff have typhus and all are recovering, but we are very shorthanded. Our staff consists of two men doctors and myself, and we feel that we need the strength of ten to get through the day's work. For the wards I wear a shapeless bag-like garment devised by myself. It has feet and legs and ties round the neck. Then I have a close white cap, a face mask, rubber gloves and boots. Yesterday I discharged a veteran Servian (Serbian) soldier, the scarred hero of a hundred fights and could find him no clothes but a Servian military coat and a split skirt made in London. He was thankful for even those, and with the addition of a blanket for overcoat set out for his home... The Servian soldiers are simply splendid, fearless and clever, and of fine physique... 

In spite of the fine situation, clear air, brilliant blue skies, with glorious snow-capped mountains in the distance, the terrible problem here is one of sanitation... in this fever-ridden country owing to the lack of sewage systems.... I must run and help look after 104 fresh patients. Some will have to go on the floor. Thank goodness the nurses are trained and skilful, and the orderlies are a credit to their colleges.’

Serbian Soldiers in Skopje

Dalyell was safely back in the UK, serving at the Addington Park War Hospital, Croydon, when Skopje was overrun by the Bulgarians in October 1915. In 1916 she joined the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service unit at Royaumont, France. Later she was allowed to join the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Malta and at Salonika, where she was the bacteriologist with No. 63 General Hospital, situated in the Durband Pass. Press reports claimed that she was the first female to hold such a job.

She served in the British Salonika Force until July 1919, with a secondment in December 1918 to No. 82 General Hospital, attached to the occupation force in Constantinople, where there was a serious epidemic that proved to be cholera.

No. 63 Hospital on the Salonika Front

In June 1919, in the Birthday Honours List, she was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (OBE), the highest honour bestowable (at the time) upon an Australian female. She had also been Mentioned in Dispatches (MiD) twice by FM (then-Gen.) Sir George Milne GCB, GCMG, DSO, KStJ (1866–1948), commander of the British Salonika Force (1916–18), and she was also decorated by the Kingdom of Serbia.

Representing the Lister Institute and the British Food Mission, she went to Vienna in August 1919 to work as a senior researcher on a team studying deficiency diseases in children. She later described this group as "the most scientific infant clinic" with "the most highly trained staff in the world." In 1923 her team published what has been called "the most complete study of human rickets prophylaxis ever undertaken." 

In appearance she was of medium height and heavy build with broad forehead, light blue eyes, "cream" complexion and "apricot" hair. When in Vienna she adopted a mannish style of dress which, with minor seasonal variations, she wore henceforth. She read "omnivorously" and collected objets d'art, especially etchings.  All who knew her agreed that she was one of those rare beings whom it was a privilege to know.

In 1923,  at the conclusion of a lecture tour in the U.S., she returned to Australia. Ironically, there was no suitable professional opportunity for her in Sydney. Without personal means, her attempt at private practice in Macquarie Street failed. In January 1924 she signed on as a microbiologist in the Department of Public Health. She wasn’t accorded professional status, and there was little prospect of advancement. Her working  life was circumscribed by  performing endless Wasserman tests for syphilis about which disease, thanks to her war service, she was an acknowledged expert. Between 1925 and 1935 she was on the committee of Sydney’s Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children and was partly responsible for founding their venereal diseases clinic, which opened in 1927. 

Rachel Forster Hospital, Sydney 

Due to her declining health, Elsie retired in 1946. She died on 1 November 1948. In recent years, she has been honored by the University of Sydney with the establishment of the Elsie Dalyell Scholars Stream, a university-wide initiative for high-achievers.

Sources: Australian Department of Veteran’s Affairs and The Australian National University’s Australian Dictionary of Biography

In the Midst of Battle Pershing Reorganizes the AEF

 

The Commander of the AEF at Work

Editor's Introduction:  During the period of 8–18 October, when General Pershing's forces were battling well entrenched enemy forces on the Heights on both sides of the Meuse River, the rate of killed and wounded for the American components of the First Army was two to three times greater than for the overall battle. Over those 11 days, 13,200 Americans were killed and 41,800 gassed or wounded. This period tooked a tremendous toll on the General that also led to his re-evaluation of his approach to command and the organization of his forces. 

In one of the best works on the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Forty-Seven Days, Historian-Archivist Mitch Yockelson described how he approached this critical moment in what was the largest battle America had ever fought thus far in the nation's history:

Pershing's Mood

Pershing began to wonder if and when his army would finally break through the German lines. He didn't want Meuse-Argonne to turn into a lengthy battle as had the Somme, Verdun, or Ypres. Logistical issues had to be overcome, primarily the clogged roads that kept ammunition, food, and other supplies from reaching the Doughboys at the front. More troubling to Pershing was the performance of the division commanders. In his opinion, they lacked the energy and initiative to keep the attacks going. This was true of some generals, and Pershing had and would continue to replace them. But for the most part, they were good commanders who lacked experience leading large bodies of men. Much like Pershing, practically all of them had prior combat experience in Cuba and the Philippines, where they had led companies of a few hundred soldiers at most. 

. . . During one of his frequent trips to the front, Colonel John G. Quekemeyer, Pershing's Mississippi-born aide-de-camp, riding alongside the general in his Cadillac, watched as the AEF commander cover his face with his hands and mumbled, “Frankie...Frankie...My God, sometimes I don't know if I can go on.” Pershing was not one to openly express his feelings, but these were dark times. Perhaps his sadness triggered thoughts of that horrible day in August 1915 when he lost Frankie and the girls [his wife and young daughters].

Fighting on the Cunel Heights by Harvey Dunn

Pershing's dour mood was hardly concealed, and it worried the officers who saw him on a frequent basis. Frederick Palmer recalled that the general's skin had turned pale; the deep desert tan from the Punitive Expedition was now gone. His skin now had a ruddy gray complexion and his eyes were tired from an obvious lack of sleep. Colonel George C. Marshall also saw the anxiety the Meuse-Argonne was taking on Pershing and in his memoirs rattled off some of the key reasons. “Distressingly heavy casualties, disorganized and only partially trained troops, supply problems of every character due to the devastated zone so rapidly crossed, inclement and cold weather, as well as stubborn resistance by the enemy on one of the strongest positions on the Western Front.”

Marshall sided with Pershing that the “officers of high rank” were to blame for First Army's problems. He did not mention any names but implied that those “not in perfect physical condition usually lost the will to conquer and took an exceedingly gloomy view of the situation except when Pershing came around, then they `bucked up' for the period of his visit, only to relapse into further depths of despondency after his departure.” Marshall thought that Pershing “carried himself with an air of relentless determination to push the operation to a decisive victory. His presence inspired confidence and his bearing convinced those with whom he came in contact that the weak-hearted would be eliminated and half measures would not be tolerated.”  

Reorganization

Pershing had indeed taken on too much by running both the AEF and First Army. The weight of such a burden would have impacted any commander. But Pershing was also resilient and smart. On 10 October he announced a change that was in the best interest of his army and was destined to become the turning point of the Meuse-Argonne. Effective 16 October, he was stepping down as First Army commander and would hand over the reins to Major General Hunter Liggett. He would also add a Second Army to be led by III Corps's Major General Robert Bullard. Both were promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. Pershing would oversee both armies as an Army Group commander on par with France's Pétain and Britain's Haig. With the changes at the top, there was a need for corps commander replacements. John L. Hines was taking over III Corps for Bullard. Cameron was demoted from V Corps and took over for Hines at the 4th Division, and replaced by Major General Charles P. Summerall, and Dickman switched from IV Corps to replace Liggett at I Corps.

Other command changes were not as significant but impacted the battlefield. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell would oversee both First and Second Armies' Air Service, while George C. Marshall would directly report to Liggett as assistant chief of operations for First Army. His job, which was still “to work out all the details of the operations,” as one staff officer put it, hadn't changed, so they were in a clear, workable order that could be “read in poor light, in the mud and rain.” 

Leaving First Army was a bold but necessary adjustment. Pershing apparently came to this decision on his own accord and consulted no one. “You never know what is in the C-in-C's mind,” one of Black Jack's aides wrote, “and how it is coming out. When it comes, it comes quick and definite—just like the outburst of a bombardment for an offensive which had been weeks in preparation.” Frederick Palmer added that Pershing “listened to many counselors; but the decisive counsels he held behind the locked doors of his own mind.” Palmer supposed that “those who thought they knew what he was going to do knew least.”

First Army needed a boost, and Hunter Liggett was the right commander to provide it. He had all the necessary traits to lead an army that was now more than a million men in strength. A brilliant tactician and corps commander, Liggett impressed Pershing and, for that matter, everyone else in the AEF and French Army. On the evening of 10 October, Liggett met with Pershing to discuss his new assignment. He recounted very little about the meeting, other than that the commanding general sounded optimistic, telling him “that if we and our Allies could keep up the gait the war would be ended by the close of the year.”

Two days later Liggett journeyed to Souilly by rail with Colonel Stackpole, and the men dined with Pershing and Colonel Hugh Drum on the train. Pershing made it clear he was still in charge and as army group commander would oversee operations. Sounding much like Foch, Pershing said from that point there would be no letup in the fighting. The next phase of MeuseArgonne would strike directly at the Kriemhilde Stellung, destroy enemy communications, and take Mézières; it was essentially the same battle plan since the one given on 26 September. Afterward, the party retired to Pershing's office for further talk about the next attack. Frederick Palmer was close by in a “stuffy little anteroom” at Souilly when Liggett emerged from the meeting, “his face glowing; his eyes sparkling as though he had seen a vision come true.”  

A few minutes later one of Pershing's aides scurried up the stairs to give his boss a message that had just come by telephone from Paris: the new German chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, had provisionally accepted President Wilson's Fourteen Points for peace. Perhaps the war would soon be over. In theory, Pershing now had more time not only to run the entire AEF but also to devote to his roles a diplomat and politician, essential duties when dealing with the other Allied commanders. 

As the AEF endured a period of organizational changes, First Army had not let up in the fighting. The next phase of Meuse-Argonne started on 14 October [two days before the command changes were to officially take place].

Hunter Liggett, First Army's New Commander

Liggett at First Army

Now at the helm of First Army, Hunter Liggett quickly encountered the problems associated with command, the very ones that had kept Pershing awake at night. Leading I Corps had been comparatively easy since he had been concerned with only the divisions assigned to him. Yet now, after 13 days of almost continuous fighting, First Army had taken a severe beating, and casualties tallied somewhere around 75,000 killed and wounded. First Army hospitals were completely overwhelmed treating soldiers who were shot up or gassed. Adding to the misery of war was a widespread influenza outbreak. In the Argonne that autumn, cold, tired, and wet troops were especially vulnerable to the wrath of the “Spanish Lady.” First Army doctors reported almost 150,000 cases of the flu in mid-October, overwhelming the field and general hospitals.

Pershing had a mild bout with the flu the week before the Argonne jump-off but was able to weather the illness. A month later, he came down with a more severe case.

Lieutenant General Liggett immediately began to “tighten up” First Army, which was getting sloppy in regard to “inattention and carelessness in saluting and straggling,” among other problems that one AEF inspector pointed out. Straggling especially had gotten out of hand. Liggett claimed that roughly 100,000 troops had left their units during the first month of the battle. He was exaggerating, but the point was well made: too many soldiers were heading to the rear. 

. . . On Wednesday 16 October, Pershing met with Foch at his Bombon headquarters to go over the changes in American command. General Weygand was there, too, and as usual their conversation was uncomfortable and heated. It seemed that Foch had forgotten what he had told McAndrew and Conner the week before [about the slowness of the Americans advance], and lectured Pershing about the Americans' lack of progress in the Argonne, telling him that “results are the only way to judge by: that if an attack is well planned and well executed it succeeds with small losses; that if it is not well planned and well executed the losses are heavy and there is no advance.” Your change in command was not important," Foch pointed out, “so long as you keep things going at the front.”  . . .  

In seventeen days we have engaged twenty-six German divisions,” Pershing noted. “I shall continue my attacks until the Germans give way.” Pausing for a moment, Pershing asked, “Provided, of course, that this is Marshal Foch's desire?”

“By all means,” said Foch.  

Excerpted from Forty-Seven Days by Mitchell Yockelson (Order HERE)

The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 by Philip Zelikow

Rather than presenting our usual book review for this interesting volume, I recommend that our readers watch this interview of author Philip Zelikow conducted by historian of Niall Ferguson of the Hoover Institution. By the way, Zelikow has an interesting public service record having played important although somewhat controversial roles with the 911 Commission and during the COVID lock-down.

Order HERE

Stalin the Bureaucrat: Gaining Power Through the Mundane

 

A Misleading Propaganda Piece
Lenin and Stalin Shown as Friendly Colleagues

After the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the Office of General Secretary was created by Lenin in 1922 with the intention that it would serve a purely administrative and disciplinary position. Its primary focus would be to determine party membership composition and assign positions within the party. The General Secretary also oversaw recording party events and keeping the party leaders and members informed in party activities as well as such apparently mundane tasks as housekeeping, security, and assigning office space.

When assembling his cabinet, Lenin appointed Joseph Stalin as the General Secretary. A masterful bureaucratic empire builder, in his first several years, Stalin would transform his new office into that of party leader and later leader of the Soviet Union.

Prior to Lenin's death, however, Stalin's tenure as General Secretary was already being criticized. In Lenin's final months, he authored a pamphlet—known as his "Testament"—that called for Stalin's removal on the justification that Stalin was becoming authoritarian and abusing his power. After Lenin died, this pamphlet resulted in a political crisis for Stalin, and a vote was held to remove him. Stalin, with the help of Grigoriy Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev survived the scandal and remained in his post. 

He cynically capitalized on Lenin's 1924 death by creating a cult over the dead former leader with himself symbolically in the role of its high priest. He also waged a relentless ideological war against his main rival, Trotsky.  By the decade's end, Stalin was the unquestioned leader of the USSR, and the General Secretary became the nation's highest office.

Trotsky had been banished from Russia in 1929. He was forced to move country of residence frequently until finally finding refuge in Mexico. It was here that after several failed assassination attempts, one of Stalin’s agents murdered Trotsky in his study.

Source: Wikipedia; Encyclopedia 1914-1918; Encyclopedia Britannica Article, "Lenin's Testament"

The Great War's Costs to Private Lives and Private Property

Skull by Otto Dix
"The war provided a windfall for scavengers such
as worms and maggots."

T. Hunt Tooley, Austin College 

European Civilization and Individuals

One of the enormous costs of the war was the percentage of wealth or productive capacity transferred from private hands into state coffers. Even the original theorist of state power, Niccolò Machiavelli, advised aspiring absolutists to keep their hands off the property (and the women) of their peasants and other productive citizens. . . By the last quarter of the 19th century, the Europe of empires, nationalism, and growing collectivism turned its back on the achievements of individuals and the autonomy of individuals and families. Just before World War I, Europeans increasingly came to define themselves by group—whether by nationality, sex, or class. Each group developed habits of calling on the government to confirm it or support it or to give it special privileges—often with the implicit threat of violence. 

All this was in direct opposition to both the conservative and liberal values of the 19th century, but liberals in Europe and the United States underwent a transformation: starting as champions of individual autonomy, they became slaves to group security. In this scenario, the war became, as Murray Rothbard and others have pointed out, fulfillment.  The policies are too familiar to enumerate: economic intervention on all sides, heavy-handed cheerleading to join the war "system," continual denunciation of internal enemies, disregard of the rule of law, massive transfer of wealth from the hands of individuals, families, and other private sources to the state. Not least of these trends was the overpowering of private lives and even privacy. From the vacuous propaganda extolling groupthink in all the societies of the belligerents to the very real breakup of family units by the Bolsheviks, the war was the cover for multifarious inroads of the interference of the state in private life.

Let us turn to some cases that give us insights into the process of decivilization—the "trek from progress" in Wilfred Owen's words. During the war, government expenditures among the belligerents increased by an average factor of about eighteen, their stated revenues by a factor of about eight. Cost-of-living indices doubled in the best cases and quadrupled in the worst. Governments in all belligerent countries intervened in their economies through price controls and rationing, and they scrambled to pay for the horrendous costs of the carnage. In so doing, they had to develop new attitudes about private property, and hence about private life itself.

Walther Rathenau provides us with an important case study. Rathenau, the head of German General Electric (AEG), served as the head of the German Office of War Materials from the first days of World War I. His office used state authority to bully companies into consolidation (electric companies included), to confiscate needed resources, to intervene quite directly in the operation of businesses large and small. His task, he revealed in a report only one year into the war, had been daunting, mainly because Germany was so attached to outdated concepts like the rule of law, or rather the rule of laws based on private ownership and disposition, such as those "defective and incomplete" laws of property holding sway since the time of Frederick the Great and earlier.  The "coercive measures" Rathenau had overseen were just part of the array of changes that would "in all probability be destined to affect future times." Indeed, Rathenau showed precisely how the process of change was achieved: by redefinition.

The term "sequestration" was given a new interpretation, somewhat arbitrarily I admit, but supported by certain passages in our martial law…. "Sequestration" [now] does not mean that merchandise or material is seized by the state, but only that it is restricted, i.e., that it no longer can be disposed of by the owner at will but must be reserved for a more important purpose…. At first many people found it difficult to adjust themselves to the new doctrine.

This kind of redefinition went on in all the belligerent countries during and long after the war, and not only in the totalitarian regimes—men like Rathenau were always ready to step forward. Redefinitions of words like confiscation and sequestration led to the re-distributional, paternalistic welfare regimes of Britain, France, and FDR's America, as well as the fascist and communist governments in Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Such re-definitions were already underway before the war, but wartime represented fulfillment. This was especially the case for the agents of the state, and for those whose fortunes depended on the expansion of the modern state.

Another wartime case that might give us insight is the related aspect of transferring private wealth to the use of the state. Let us look at wartime inflation. The inflation policies of most of the belligerent powers represent, after all, an extension of the newly redefined erosions of private property. Historically, inflation is a classic game of legal plunder, more effective than taxes since the legalized theft is concealed. Hence, as World War I governments grew by leaps and bounds, as they employed more and more henchmen—both military and regulatory—to do the state's bidding, they transferred correspondingly more of the wealth of their people to the state.

All First World War belligerents "created" currency or money by printing it or imagining it in the form of credit. World War I planners also paved the way for what we might call the modern "ethics" of inflation (extolled by Keynes and later by the Phillips-curve cheering section) by ignoring the involuntary nature of this transfer of wealth and encouraging the victims of these transfers to regard them as acts of patriotism. The head of the German central bank told the bank's board as early as 25 September 1914, that the best way to cover the massive war costs to come would be "an appeal to an entire people," an appeal to "ethical values and not merely personal gain."

After 1918, governments tended to back off somewhat from the more extreme taxation of wartime, but transfers of private property to the states continued in the form of inflation. Even in the United States of the postwar period, when there was technically not much growth of the currency supply itself, there was very substantial credit expansion fueled by the federal government and fostered by the Federal Reserve, as Murray Rothbard demonstrated many years ago in his book America's Great Depression. In general, the Austrian economists, from Mises and Bresciani-Turroni onward, showed quite clearly that the 1920s represented a highly inflationary bubble whose bursting triggered the Great Depression.

If we add to this hidden "inflation tax" that wartime tax hikes raised taxes from a factor of three upward, it is clear that the state crossed a threshold during World War I, a threshold to a much, much higher transfer of private wealth to the state. During the postwar period, the levels abated somewhat, but by and large, the ground was prepared for a continual rise of such transfers up to the end of the 20th century and beyond.

I am suggesting here that a far-reaching cost of the war was the degradation of the autonomy of individuals and families in relation to their property. I might add that the huge, flashy fortunes of the 20th century are not the private property I primarily have in mind, since many of those fortunes are based on monopolistic partnerships between great centers of wealth and governments—the soul of rent-seeking activity, of soaking the producers. What I have in mind is the justice of keeping what one has worked for, the justice inherent in that wonderful capability of the human condition to work hard, plan, and save in order to survive, give, and consume in ways chosen by the individual and family—countered by the state's aggressive tendency to take larger and larger chunks.

The Nationalization of the Private

Part of the problem for henchmen of the state was the question of how to nationalize and systematize a broad swath of essentially private aspects of life. Of thousands of cases we might study in this regard, the multifarious issues of public schooling are perhaps the most closely associated with the loss of privacy. And these issues are revealing when we think of them in connection with the Great War. Here I will concentrate on the United States, where the sainted John Dewey comes importantly into consideration. Dewey's complex collectivist vision of the role of education in society was based on destroying the old mediating habits of individual and family custom, tradition, and negotiation. Like his fellow progressives Frederick Taylor and Edward Mandell House, he believed the new community would be controlled by sophisticated administrators of the "system" who understood the problems of individualism. As Dewey wrote a decade before the war,

We are apt to look at the school from an individualistic standpoint, as something between teacher and pupil, or between teacher and parent…. And rightly so. Yet the range of the outlook needs to be enlarged. What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.

In the fight to regiment children democratically, Dewey was supported by rafts of progressive foot soldiers. To look at just one, we might think of sociologist and journalist Frances Kellor. Leading the Americanization movement in the period before the war, Kellor linked her predilections for American nationalism, industrial efficiency, and the need for indoctrinating immigrants with American attitudes, creating a movement that took off as World War I started. By 1916, the increasingly influential Kellor was calling for universal military service, carefully crafted indoctrination in the school curricula, and the revitalization of America. She welcomed the coming war because it would create that "heroic spirit by which a nation is finally welded together…." By the end of the war, Kellor and others like her took credit for the real work of lobbying state legislatures successfully to implement a new regime of education, outlawing foreign-language schools, public and private, promoting Americanization classes, and otherwise using the schools to promote the progressive agenda of the destruction of privacy and the immersion of the individual in the murky waters of democracy. 

Another case study has to do with the ways in which states nationalize villages, families, and regions in the name of disaster. Our example is the village of Vauquois, a typical village of the Argonne Forest region of Lorraine, a hilltop home for several hundred peaceful French citizens before 1914. When the war broke out, units of the French army retreated from the frontier to Vauquois in the first weeks of the war and made a stand there. The Germans attacked, but as so often happened, the armies deadlocked, in this case across the very top of the oblong hill or ridge. The sides dug in, both trench lines running through the village, indeed, within easy stone's—or grenade's—throw of each other. This segment of the Western Front line remained in place for four years, except for the blowing to pieces of the narrow no man's land in between by underground mines. Hence, the hill was literally hollowed out by explosives and honeycombed with tunnels. Occasionally, the soldiers fought it out underground. Occasionally, they swapped tobacco and chocolate instead. The American First Army moved into the French positions in September 1918, and "took" the German Vauquois position by incinerating it with thermite shells and then simply going around Vauquois. 

But what had happened to the close-knit French villagers? They were evacuated and relocated many miles behind the lines, where they languished during the war. Once the war was over, the military bureaucracy of French reconstruction—famously haughty and inept—continued to restrict the area so that official reclamation workers could "reclaim" the village, in spite of the pleas of the villagers to let them return to reclaim their own property. Since there was, in fact, no village left beyond huge craters and some bits of masonry, the French government finally—years after the evacuation and even the war itself—decided to declare the area a "red zone." That is to say, no one was allowed to move back in. The plight of the Vauquois villagers finally became privatized, and several charity collections enabled the villagers to return, buy some land a few hundred yards down the hill, and establish new Vauquois. 

Hence, the state had brought on the war that engulfed the private lives of those in Vauquois. The state had removed them for their own safety, and the state prevented them from coming back to salvage what could be salvaged. This is a pattern so engrained ninety years later that it might take some effort to imagine it otherwise: the sooner those individuals could return after the war moved beyond the region in September 1918, the more chance there was for reclaiming something, for recycling the remains, for salvaging what could be salvaged. The sooner they were released from nationalization and returned to private existence rather than living as a part of the war system in another city, the more the natural order of individual, family, and village might reassert itself, even if hard work was necessary. Instead, they faced bureaucratic delays while their government collected millions of francs' worth of reparations from Germany and built new government buildings and various other "infrastructural" additions to France (highways, etc.) far from Vauquois.

With disasters like that of Vauquois and a hundred other French towns and villages, we gain insight into the genesis of the state management of disasters in the 21st century. Individuals who try to protect their own property during a storm are regarded as opponents of the state—problems for the police to deal with. The recent FEMA debacles are only the latest and most extreme version.

Inquiry into many other case studies would fill out the outlines of this story: conscientious objection to the war, the enlistment of women into ultra-toxic munitions factories, the propaganda of state obligation that led young women to give out white feathers to able-bodied men who had not enlisted in the army, the program of forced labor in Germany, the internment of ethnic Germans in Australia, the policy of opening the US mail in the search for saboteurs and traitors, and many, many more. But to cut a long story short, as with Rathenau's "sequestration" of private property, and with the "systematization" of state-managed disasters, the upshot of the Great War crisis, as Robert Higgs might point out, was a sea change in all relations of the individual to the state, and therefore a sea change in all relations between and among individuals, families, churches, and non-state groups.

As I suggested in my opening line, we shall never be able to count the costs of the Great War. We can, however, come to appreciate the world that was lost when the lights went out all over Europe in 1914 and elsewhere thereafter. One of the most important costs was the beginning of the nationalization of private life that continues its course to the present day.

$40 $35

Let me add that this accounting of costs and the whole view of the war in its negative aspects are hardly conceivable in modern democratic and statist modes of thinking. After all is said and done, perhaps the war did make the world safe for democracy. Indeed, Randolph Bourne, famous for observing that war is the health of the state, might have gone further: war is not only the health of the state, but the health of democracy too. There is hardly any aspect of war that is unwelcome to the modern collectivist-democratic state. War justifies every desired measure for the expansion of state power; it necessitates the removal of all intermediaries among or between the state and individuals, families, or other natural human units. War exalts the collective and tends to kill, maim, humiliate, or corrupt the individual. War lends an air of sacralization to the modern positivist, humanist civic religion. Our war-related national holidays represent high holy days, except that the sacrifice extolled is the sacrifice of individuals in the service of the state (or of "freedom" or whatever buzzword the state happens to be using as a synonym for its powers). Hence, from this perspective, the costs of war to individuals are transformed into clear profits for the state.

Source: Excerpted from "Some Costs of the Great War: Nationalizing Private Life," Website of  the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 23 January 2009