Tommies and Their Officers

1915 British Trench

The men flung themselves into the blood baths of no-man's land because it was their duty, because they could not let the side down, and because they did not want to appear unwilling in the eyes of their comrades and officers. The notion that every man did his duty for God and Country regardless of the cost may only appear as so much rhetoric [a century] after the fact, but for the men who were on the spot it was a very serious matter of honour and pride. . .

It was the officer's responsibility to ensure that the men did their fighting with a will, and the knowledge that so many of the soldiers would not survive made this responsibility a hard one to carry. It was to their officers that the men looked for leadership, and if they were calm and confident men, these qualities would be transmitted to the men; but if the officers were "windy" (unsure and afraid), the men looked to their N.C.O.s and each other for leadership. John Keegan describes the relationship between the officers and men of the New Armies as one of being "... the ardent desire on the one hand to teach, to encourage, to be accepted, on the other to learn and be led which made intercourse between them (the officers and men) possible." Keegan goes on to include Siegfried Sassoon’s  description of how his own life was changed by the expression of  total trust and self surrender visible in the faces of his men as  they: "... looked up at him as they squatted cross legged, while he inspected their feet after a route march."  

If John Keegan's portrayal of the relationship between officers and men appears somewhat idyllic, Robert Graves paints an entirely different, and somehow more believable, picture of young officers suffering from nervous collapse and turning to alcohol for the strength to carry on: "I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough  to get wounded." Graves also includes several accounts of officers  maltreating their men and physically beating them, and occasions when  officers forced their troops to "go over the top," even when they  knew that the attack would serve no purpose and could have been avoided. As a result, there were isolated incidents of especially harsh  officers being killed by sniper bullets which came from suspicious directions; something which is not surprising when one reads of an officer admitting that: "In both the last two shows I had to shoot  a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench."

[Rank did have its privileges]  To be sure, brothels were to be found in or near the rest areas, and it is worth noting that, even there, military  decorum was preserved with the provision of red lamps over the establishments available for rankers and blue lights for the officers. Robert Graves writes that he remembers seeing a queue of 150 men waiting outside a red lamp brothel, each to have his turn with one of three women in the house. The cost was eight shillings a man. . .   

Source: "The Private Soldier in the First World War" by Otte Rosenkrantz, The Mirror, 1983