Call-to-Arms, by Charles Messenger

Call-to-Arms: The British Army 1914-18, by Charles Messenger
Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2005
506 pages plus British Army Acronyms, Medical Categories, Infantry units, Sources, bibliography, index and 16 pages of b&w photos

Description
In 1914 the British Army was scarcely more than an imperial police force. However professional, it was dwarfed by its Continental neighbors anf rivals. But by the end of the Fiurst World War, over 8.5 million men had been recruited and the British Army had become the most effective fighting force on the Western Front.

Charles Messenger charts how this unprecedented new force was raised, trained and deployed. He looks in detail at the problems of recruitment and training and at the difficulties of integrating regular troops with volunteers and later, conscripted men.

How was morale sustained among men wholly unused to military life but fighting a war in which death was dealt out on an industrial scale? And what was the role of women, who for the first time played a significant role in a major conflict?

Discipline, the treatment of the wounded, the provision of clothing, the huge difficulties such a vast force, the awarding of medals and other honours, officer selection, and the training of the Staff are just some of the themes in this comprehensive survey of the organisation of Britain's army in the First World WAr.

Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Introduction
1. The British Army in 1914
2. The REgular army Goes to War
3. The Territorials
4. The New Armies
5. Conscription
6. New Weapons, New Arms
7. Labour
8. Women in khaki
9. Manpower at the Front and the Crisis of 1918
10. Officer Selection and Training
11. The Staff
12. Discipline
13. Medicine
14. Welfare and Morale
15. Honours and Awards
16. The Verdict
Appendix 1: British Army Acronyms
Appendix 2: Medical Categories
Appendix 3: Infanrtry Units
Sources
Bibliography
Index

Students Learn Horrors of WWI ‘Firsthand’

Laurel Hill Connection: Students Learn Horrors of WWI ‘Firsthand’

Chances are, some 600 seventh-graders at Robinson Secondary won’t soon forget what life was like for soldiers during World War I. That’s because they recently participated in a simulation of life in the trenches.

"This is an awful, inhumane period of time," middle school Social Studies Department Chairman Susan Reade told her students at the outset. "I need you to use your imaginations and commit to this. I need you to think, ‘What if this were real and there were bullets flying and bombs going off? How would I feel?"

She and four other social studies teachers recreated an hour-long, battle-zone atmosphere over three days, while students huddled together on the floor, under long tables in a darkened room. Images of war were projected on a screen while the teacher read excerpts from Erich Maria Remarque’s "All Quiet on the Western Front."
"We’re trying to communicate the horrors of the living conditions relevant to WWI and the weapons of destruction created then," said Reade. "This piece gives them the opportunity to really feel, hear and believe they’re in a battle situation. It should be uncomfortable and thought-provoking. Anytime you have kids in an interactive situation, where they can put themselves in that state and time, it’ll be more meaningful for them and they’ll really remember it."

One session involved 31 students in Reade’s sixth-period class, and she prepared them beforehand for life in the trenches. She said the border between Germany and France contained 475 miles of trenches, which were fought over for three years.

"Ten million people died in WWI because we had the bullet and bomb capability to do it," said Reade. "Soldiers dug trenches in the dirt, underground, with tree roots, insects crawling all around and rodents. This is a filthy, dirty place, and this is where you live, eat and try to sleep, 24/7, no matter the weather."

"Your uniforms are wool, so they itch, and lice are a tremendous problem," she said. "Rain turns the dirt into mud and your feet are always wet, so you get trench foot. It’s almost unlivable, and the noise of the bombs overhead is continual.

Soldiers will have shell-shock and uncontrollable ticks. Some were hospitalized and traumatized for months and years afterward."

The worst thing, said Reade, was the poison gas created for that war. "If you get it in your eyes, it causes blindness," she said. "If it gets in your throat, the acid burns your lungs and you take days to die."

For the simulation, students wore surgical masks, but social studies teacher John Perriello had one girl briefly don a real gas mask for illustration. Then, while students crouched under tables in their "trenches," Reade had them write down everything they saw, heard and smelled during their experience.

With battle scenes projected onscreen, Reade would intermittently yell, "Incoming!" as she and Periello smacked the tops of the tables hard with mop handles and big blocks of wood, while a soundtrack of shooting and explosions played loudly.
"Write for me what you’re afraid of," Reade told the students. "What are the dangers? How are you preparing yourself to face them? What are you thinking about? You’ve been shelled for three days in a row; how does your head feel? You’ve been on the ground awhile now; how do your legs and back feel?"

The teachers also blew shrill whistles, from time to time, and rang cowbells to simulate the bells warning that a gas attack was coming. "It’s poisonous, chlorine gas," shouted Reade. "Is your mask on tight enough? The mask itches and scratches and covers your whole face. It gives you claustrophobia. How do you feel?"

Detailing more about what the soldiers went through, she said, "Besides protecting your head, your helmet was your bathtub and what you ate meals out of. One piece of bread and one tin of meat is your ration for 24 hours. How will you make it last? The rats have nibbled on your bread. Will you still eat it? The meat is spoiled, but you eat it anyway and feel sick."

They also had mail call, with some "soldiers" receiving mail, and others, nothing. Again, students wrote how they felt. Afterward, they shared their thoughts about the whole experience.

"It was like it was real," said Brendan Benning. "You could hear the bombs exploding and the machine guns. It was like you were right there. My back was sore and the cramped position hurt. It feels like the ‘bang, bang, bang’ would never go out of your head." He said he would have tried trading his spoiled meat for smaller pieces that were better, but "It would be disgusting living there. I’d have to have a stick to beat up the rats."

Charlotte Hyland said it enabled the students to put themselves in the soldiers’ places. "You had a good sense of what they felt," she said. "The positions we were sitting in, the noise and the screaming were almost scary, and it was much worse in the actual war. I don’t think I could have coped with it. Those soldiers must have been really strong to have gone through that."

In her "letter," she received a Starburst candy with a note saying, "A treat from mom and dad."

"It made me happy that they didn’t forget about me," said Charlotte. "It also made me remember I wasn’t dead, but was still alive and who I was."

During the simulation, she said, "I was scared. Everything was loud, it was hot and it hurt lying down. I just wanted to get out of there. It’s hard to imagine what it was like doing that for years."

John Anderson said it was fun, but that he could see how bad it was for those actually there. "It gives us a real picture of what it would be like," he said. "A lot of people go off to war not realizing how bad it is." He added that the simulation would leave more of an imprint on the students than just reading from a textbook.

John, too, was happy to get mail. "My mom and dad told me what was going on at home," he said. "It made the problems of war lift up for a couple seconds so I could remember the good parts of life."

Lucas Puranen also liked the simulation. "It was very loud," he said. "It must be annoying always having bombs and planes overhead. It was also disgusting, but real soldiers have to live with it. They’d be stronger mentally because of all the things they’d gone through, if they were still sane. Having to sleep in the mud with the constant sound of rats was gross." Lucas also wondered how well the gas masks really worked. "I have to respect the current U.S. troops for all they do," he said. "I don’t know how they do it."

For homework, the students had to write as if it were 1916 and argue that the U.S. should or shouldn’t enter WWI. They had to give three reasons supporting their statement and list a factual event backing up one of their reasons. Reade also shared with them a letter her grandfather wrote home from that war, July 24, 1918.
A medical officer, he treated patients in a field hospital in France. Describing a German air attack on the hospital, he expressed contempt for anyone who’d do such a thing, but was confident the war would be over soon. "The spirit, courage and morale of our boys is the most wonderful thing," he wrote. "We know that victory is ours, sooner or later."

Versed in the Horror of War

WAll Street Journal, Books & Ideas: Versed in the Horror of War
The first year of World War I, according to one German critic, produced something remarkable: 600,000 poems. Combatants and non-combatants alike were mobilized to put their feelings into words.

The British government held a secret meeting in London of eminent literary men, from Thomas Hardy to H. G. Wells, to persuade them to write patriotic poems and letters to the press. It was in the context of this war effort in words that Rupert Brooke produced his most famous lines: "If I should die, think only this of me. . . ."

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English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon
The Red Sweet Wine of Youth
By Nicholas Murray
Little, Brown, 352 pages, £25
But everybody knows what happens next—don't they? Brooke may still be thought of, from time to time, but it was his disillusioned successors, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who would use verse to express their horror at the mechanized, inglorious slaughter of millions of their fellow soldiers, on the Western Front. And for Sassoon, the complacent approval of the war he encountered "back home" was the final twist of the knife: "For you our battles shine / With triumph half-divine," he wrote in "To the Warmongers," "But a curse is on my head . . .".

Nicholas Murray's new book concentrates on the lives of 12 of the best-known poets who fought in the First World War on the British side.

Several were wounded during active service on the Western Front. Some died in battle or not far behind the lines; others lived to tell the tale (in some cases, at great length and to the irritation of military historians). All will be familiar names from those popular anthologies of war poetry that have appeared so relentlessly over the past century (and in fact, a similarly biographical study appeared late last year, "Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War" by Harry Ricketts).

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Officer Cadet Wilfred Owen
"The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets" is a book about "the impact of that war on the sensibility of the artist"; it also sets out to show that Sassoon et al were not necessarily antiwar but antiheroism, as in the mocking title of one of Wilfred Owen's most famous poems, "Dulce et Decorum Est." In their journals and letters, memoirs and verses, Owen and his fellow writers collectively show the scales falling from their eyes. Isaac Rosenberg could proclaim that "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. . . . I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over," while an earlier victim of the war, Charles Hamilton Sorley, wrote that "There is no such thing as a just war. What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan"—before he even got to France. These are words that echoes down the years to the present day. If there are no more soldier-poets—at least, there don't seem to be very many on active service in Iraq or Afghanistan—there are certainly those who have faced court martial for expressing similar views.

Mr. Murray quotes relatively little poetry in "The Red Sweet Wine of Youth," which is odd, given that when he does quote it, he has plenty of interesting things to say about it. He prefers prose, quoted at length.

Readers who would like to have a more detailed account of how this war changed poetic form and technique (Owen's innovative use of "pararhyme" being the most obvious example) will have to look elsewhere. Yet this is really at the heart of the matter. Would these poets still be widely read or highly regarded, in other words, if war was not their subject? I hope that they would be, and not just for what they express, but how they expressed it.

Perhaps over-reliant on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for certain minor details (that Sorley's posthumous collection of poems ran to six editions in its first year of publication, for instance, which it didn't) and turns of phrase, Mr. Murray's collective biography is in other ways a product of scrupulous industry. The author has visited poets' graves, consulted Sassoon's papers at the Imperial War Museum in London (an "exquisite refinement of torture"); he has drawn on the most up-to-date work on World War I and its poets. The result is a thoughtful and sometimes moving book. It seems unlikely that modern soldiers' tales (in prose), taking their cue and their tone from the collected works of Andy McNab, will produce a similar reverence in years to come.

—Mr. Caines works for the Times Literary Supplement, and recently edited an anthology about the 18th-century actor David Garrick.

KC exhibit explores WWI from perspective of German soldiers

Columbia Daily Tribune: KC exhibit explores WWI from perspective of German soldiers
On our second visit recently to Kansas City’s National World War I Museum, I was impressed by its special exhibit, “Man and Machine: The German Soldier in World War I.” It is unique to find an American exhibit focusing on the enemy’s equipment and the viewpoints of its soldiers. At this distance in time, we can accept them as fellow sufferers rather than the monsters they were once portrayed as. We also could learn how machines can transform a war. The Great War to end all wars, as it was publicized at the time, left a legacy that instead set the scene for World War II and still has an effect on the world today.

Carl Hauber was a collector of German World War I battle materials, and after his death, his wife gave the historical objects to the museum. Among them were 23 of the 24 different machine guns used by the German army, a half dozen of which form the basis of this special exhibit.

We were fortunate to have a young history buff as the docent when we investigated the exhibit in one of the tower exhibition halls. He explained that despite the fact troops were equipped with rifles and shot millions of bullets, the killing in the Great War was done mostly by other methods. Artillery killed 70 percent, machine guns 20 percent, gas 5 percent and rifles 5 percent. In movies, we see a lot of bayonet charges, but the English only lost .33 percent and Americans .1 percent of their troops to bayonets. Included in the displays were leather-and-steel helmets, gas masks, officers’ pistols, hand grenades, one of the first antitank weapons and, within a life-size trench, a paper sign that reads, “Do not use this route.”

Large posters on the walls showed German soldiers’ reactions to what was happening were similar to those of American, British and French soldiers. On the posters were some of the German soldiers’ words, for example:

“When I joined the army in the spring of 1918, I carried presumptions that the war would be fought like the 1870 War between Germany and France. Man-to-man combat, for instance. But in the trenches friend and foe alike suffer from the effects of invisible machinery. It is not enough to conquer the enemy. He has to be totally destroyed.”

To get to the main exhibits, we walked on a glass bridge with a field of 9,000 poppies, each one representing 1,000 dead combatants. As with my first visit to the museum in 2006, I was impressed by the multiple ways the museum has to show what the war was like, how it started and what it did to change the map of the world.

A movie described the buildup to the war. Europe had become industrialized with wealth amassed in a few hands. European nations were in control of much of the world and were fighting to control even more. Nationalism was growing; hatred among ethnic groups was high. Sixty-five million men from 36 countries fought in the war, and 9 million of them were killed. When the United States entered in 1917, we sent more than 2 million men.

The most impressive exhibit might be the movies shown on a giant screen built along the side of a trench with mannequins walking below.

The “Man and Machine” exhibit runs through Dec. 31.

An artist's view of World War I

The Kansas City Star: An artist's view of World War I
"On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919-1941" by Steven Trout; University of Alabama Press (344 pages, $48.50)

At some point, Steven Trout, author of "On the Battlefield of Memory," visited the grave of William Davis in Winchester, Kan. What he found probably wasn't what he expected.

In the 1940 painting "The Return of Private Davis From the Argonne," Kansas artist John Steuart Curry had depicted the 1921 ceremonial reinterment of Davis' body. The young man had been a friend of Curry's and one of the first members of the Kansas National Guard to die in France in 1918.

But, as Trout soon recognized, there were issues with Curry's version of events.

The Davis grave is on a steep incline from which no distant horizon can be glimpsed. The view is not at all as presented by Curry on his canvas, on which mourners are dwarfed by a vast Kansas prairie.

There was more. Davis, Trout's research revealed, didn't die during the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the epic offensive of September 1918 that helped hasten the war's end some two months later.

In fact, Davis had been killed more than a month earlier, and in the Vosges Mountains in eastern France.

What was the artist's point in suggesting otherwise? It was this distance between historical reality and artistic license that intrigued Trout - English professor at Fort Hays State University - and prompted his investigation of the painting's backstory. The Curry canvas is one of many artistic representations of World War I's sacrifice and aftermath that Trout subjects to scrutiny.

He devotes separate chapters to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, dedicated in 1921, and the European grave of Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore, who died in 1918 while serving as a pilot over France. He also discusses post-war film and fiction, as well as the work of several artists, Curry among then.

At a minimum, Trout demonstrates that the ways the Great War was remembered in the years following the armistice often were at odds with the official reasons why we fought.

To that end, Trout wonders whether Curry tweaked the narrative of Private Davis' death to advance his own agenda, sometimes in subtle ways.

That huge Kansas horizon is an example. Curry - like Private Davis, a one-time resident of Jefferson County, not far from Kansas City - by the late 1930s lived in Connecticut, near his patrons. But the artist today is perhaps best known for "Tragic Prelude," a mural in the Topeka statehouse, with its wild-eyed John Brown.

Curry knew where his bread was buttered. He "was adept at giving his East Coast audience what it wanted: scenes, the more violent or grotesque the better, of exotic flatlanders inhabiting a strange, monotonous landscape," Trout writes.

The canvas details a crowd of mourning residents huddled around the flag-draped casket, listening to a minister. If the artist treats the mourners with respect, Trout writes, his depiction of the preacher is not flattering - as if Curry is signaling his disregard for the day's official articulator of the country's collective sacrifice.

Trout even sees a similar signal in the Model T Fords lined up in the painting's background. "This may seem to be a stretch," he writes. But in the then-contemporary fiction of Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, enthusiasm for motor cars was used to suggest, Trout writes, "the deadening conformity of small-town America."

Trout also considers the long gestation of the painting, not completed until 1940. Curry was an isolationist, and Trout considers it possible that the gathering storm in Europe prompted Curry not only to finally complete his long-considered painting, but also to give it a title that would remind viewers of the more than 26,000 Americans killed in the Meuse-Argonne action.

"To view this canvas is to feel simultaneously the force and the failure of war remembrance when confronted with a conflict fought far away - somewhere over the Kansas rainbow - for a questionable cause and with dubious outcomes," Trout writes.

Perhaps it's odd that the book has no apparent discussion of George Creel, the former Kansas City newspaper reporter who led the U.S. propaganda effort during the war and largely was responsible for language and imagery used to convince Americans of the war's necessity.

But the book is, at minimum, timely given the approaching anniversary of the war - the Civil War. While many Americans may be familiar with the continuing debate regarding the Civil War's origins and ends, Trout's book poses the possibility that it may be the more recent conflict whose meaning has grown more ambiguous.

In fairness, Curry ultimately didn't think himself above the residents of Winchester. Upon his death in 1946, Curry - like Davis - was buried there.

America's last World War I veteran grew up in Ozarks

News-Leader.com, Springfield, MO: America's last World War I veteran grew up in Ozarks
America's last World War I veteran calls West Virginia home, but 110-year-old Frank Buckles has fond memories of his childhood in Missouri, his biographer said Tuesday as Buckles celebrated his birthday.

Although Buckles no longer gives interviews, he remains alert and able to recount his experiences, David DeJonge said.

DeJonge is Buckles' official biographer and is trying to get a documentary film about Buckles made.

Buckles is honorary president of the World War I Memorial Foundation, which is trying to get a national memorial built in Washington, D.C. DeJonge is foundation president.

Lockwood history teacher Mike Shores has followed the lives of Missouri's last World War I veterans, including Buckles.

Shores said he got interested in World War I veterans while working at a gas station in his hometown of Norwood.

The station owner had a brother who died during the war, and his boss recounted stories about his brother, Shores said.

Buckles probably deserves more attention as the United States' last World War I veteran, Shores said.

He is the oldest of the world's three surviving veterans of the conflict.

On Tuesday, The Associated Press noted Buckles' birthday in its daily history article. News media in West Virginia also reported on Buckles, who lives at Gap View Farm, the old family place overlooking Harpers Ferry, Va.

Buckles was born in Bethany and lived in the small Vernon County community of Walker from 1910 to 1916, Shores said.

There are still some Walker residents around whose families were acquainted with Buckles and his family, he said.

Buckles' family moved to Oklahoma in 1916. When the United States entered World War I, Buckles decided to enlist despite being only 16 years old, Shores said.

Buckles eventually joined the Army after he told a recruiter the only way he could prove he was old enough to enlist was to send for the family Bible, which was in Missouri.

Rather than wait for proof of Buckles' age, the Army recruiter signed him up, Shores said.

A photograph taken after Buckles enlisted portrays a slight young man wearing a uniform and campaign hat.

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Shores said he agrees Buckles looked more like a Boy Scout than a soldier.

Buckles was assigned to the 1st Fort Riley Casual Detachment and eventually ended up in France, driving an ambulance, Shores said. After the Armistice, he helped return German prisoners to their homeland.

Once out of the Army, Buckles became a businessman and eventually worked for a steamship line in the Philippines just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. Pacific possessions, including the Philippines.

He spent 3 1/2 years as a civilian prisoner.

Although he moved to West Virginia after returning to the United States, Buckles recalled his boyhood in Missouri with fondness and enjoyed visiting the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City several years ago, DeJonge said.

"He's talked to me about growing up in Missouri, he talked to me about riding to school on horses," DeJonge said.

Buckles' Missouri roots may have played a role in his determination to get into the Army at 16, and to endure being a prisoner during World War II, he said.

"He learned a lot about determination, and hard work in Missouri," he said.