Читать книгу The Times Great War Letters: Correspondence during the First World War - James Owen - Страница 6

“The correspondence column of The Times may be regarded as the Forum of our modern world,” wrote the evangelist Frederick Meyer to the newspaper in 1915, “in which the individual may deliver his soul.”

The paper has published letters since its establishment in 1785, but in the nineteenth century these had often been lengthy political tracts rather than brief observations on current events. As Meyer noted, however, by the time what became known as the Great War began, the Letters Page had started to assume a form we would recognise today.

This was partly because they were, for the first time, at least on occasion, being grouped together rather than distributed throughout the paper. This greater focus arguably increased their impact, cementing in turn the page’s status as Meyer’s contemporary Roman forum – a meeting place-cum-soap box, albeit principally for the ruling class.

These developments were to be accelerated by the war that dominated everyone’s thoughts between 1914 and 1918. The letters in this selection track its progress, albeit with the proviso that strict government censorship meant that the public was unaware for much of the conflict about the true state of events, and the conflict’s real horrors.

Even so, these letters offer the most direct of routes back into the mentality of a society that was on the cusp of changing forever. And, besides delivering their soul and having their say, in a perhaps surprising way correspondents bare it, too. Set among letters from familiar names – David Lloyd George on the danger of drink, Edith Cavell on nursing before she was executed by the Germans – and ones from the pseudonyms then permitted, there are those from grieving parents still (within the conventions of the day) raw from their loss.

Many of the letters speak for themselves but it may be of help to have an outline of their increasingly distant context. The war did not come as a surprise. Conflict between the great European powers had been long feared, and expected, particularly given Germany’s desire in the preceding decades to challenge Britain’s naval, and hence imperial, supremacy.

Nonetheless, it was with some reluctance that the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, whose party had strong pacifist traditions, committed his Liberal government to war at the start of August 1914. This was technically in response to Germany’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality in entering its territory to get around France’s defences; but in reality, it was the inevitable outcome of a complex system of international alliances and dynastic ambitions.

The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne at Sarajevo by Serbian-backed terrorists had given the Austrians a pretext to declare war on Serbia, egged on by their German cousins under Kaiser Wilhelm II. This in turn brought to the fray Russia, ruled by Tsar Nicholas II, as Serbia’s pan-Slavic protector. Germany, which had built up a huge army and navy, had long planned to fight at the same time Russia and France, who were both allied with Britain.

Other nations eventually became involved. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Powers, while Japan and Italy came in with the Allies, the latter in 1915 after being promised historically Austrian territory on its then frontiers. The war spread through European colonies across much of the globe, although the United States remained neutral at first.

The British public hoped for a short conflict, but the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, foresaw that it would last for years and that Britain’s small standing army would need massive expansion. Initial German successes in Belgium and France were stemmed in part by the British Expeditionary Force and the two sides settled into a slow, grim slog for territory, characterised as trench warfare.

For much of the war the British population had little detailed or accurate information about what was happening on the various fronts. The press played its part in concealing the truth, publishing rumours of German atrocities and spinning defeats as successes. Even so, the mounting toll of casualties could not be hidden, eventually approaching three-quarters of a million British dead (although this was far less than suffered by the French, Russian and German armies). The upper and middle classes, which supplied most of the junior officers who led attacks, were especially hard hit. Eton, for instance, lost 1,157 former pupils out of 5,619 who served.

After much debate, conscription was introduced in Britain for men between the ages of 18 and 41 in 1916; the age limit was raised to 50 two years later. Before then, recruitment had been supplied by volunteers – “Your Country Needs You”, as the famous poster had it. There had been political hesitation particularly over imposing armed service on working class men, who often did not have the vote since they were not property owners.

The continued strain of the war exposed many fracture lines. Suffragists kept up the pressure to give the vote to women, although some of the main campaigners focused their efforts on encouraging women to do war work to show their worth. Long-standing tensions within Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, as to whether it should take its orders from London led in 1916 to the Easter Rising in Dublin (and eventually to an independent Republic). In Russia, catastrophe in battle ultimately led to the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917.

Many efforts were made to break the deadlock in the trenches. British efforts to outflank their enemies by forcing the Dardanelles and seizing Constantinople were thwarted by the Turks at Gallipoli, notwithstanding much gallantry and suffering by Australian and New Zealand troops, among many others. The failure led in time to the resignation from the cabinet of Winston Churchill, seen as the architect of the plan at the Admiralty.

By then, revelations in The Times about a shortage of artillery shells held responsible for recent setbacks on the Western Front led to Asquith being forced in mid-1915 to reconstitute his government as a coalition with the Conservatives and the first Labour cabinet minister. Lloyd George was placed in charge of a nationalised munitions policy and his successful implementation of it, together with the backing of The Times’s owner Lord Northcliffe, enabled him to unseat Asquith as prime minister at the end of 1916.

This was only shortly after the end of the prolonged Battle of the Somme, which came to symbolise the apparent futility of the conflict and its mass carnage. Civilians on the home front had also felt the effects of war as never before, with Zeppelins carrying out the first air raids over Britain and the depredations of submarines leading by 1918 to extensive rationing.

U-boat attacks on shipping bound for Britain, most notoriously the sinking of the liner Lusitania in 1915, with American passengers aboard, helped prompt President Woodrow Wilson to bring his nation to the Allied cause in 1917. The tide of the war did not turn decisively, however, until the summer of 1918, when breakthroughs on the Western Front and widespread discontent with the Kaiser in Germany led to his abdication and the signing of armistices in November.

The reverberations of the war would be felt for decades to come. The old order had been decisively shattered. Not only would the map of Europe, and indeed of the world, have to be redrawn as empires were dismembered and new nations created, but society’s assumptions had been shaken by the conflict, not least that as to which class was the only one fit to govern. And millions of those who had been affected by the war would have to live for the rest of their lives with the effects of wounds, shellshock, poison gas, grief and trauma. These letters were to prove to be the last snapshots of a vanishing age.

Notwithstanding that the letters in this anthology were written at a time when views that might give offence today were tolerated, the original language, style and format of them as they appeared in the newspaper has not been amended. The date on the letter is that on which it first appeared in the newspaper, and an index of the letter-writers can be found at the end of the book. Explanatory footnotes have been added where some clarification of the subject matter of a letter may be of use.

JAMES OWEN AND SAMANTHA WYNDHAM