When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 after the invasion of Belgium, a wave of patriotic fervor swept the country. Enthusiastic crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace in London, while long lines formed at recruiting stations in towns and cities across the UK. Britain‘s small professional army, adapted more for colonial policing than large-scale continental warfare, needed to expand rapidly by several orders of magnitude.
In the first month alone, over 300,000 men volunteered to fight for King and Country.[^1] By the end of the war, nearly 25% of the total male population of the United Kingdom between the ages of 18 and 51 had joined up, with the small prewar regular army of 700,000 swelling to nearly 5.4 million men.[^2] The early optimism and idealism would soon collide with the grim realities of industrial warfare, but in those early days there was a rush to the colors.
Recruitment and Training
Particularly notable were the so-called "Pals Battalions" – units raised from a particular town, workplace, or other local community, allowing friends, neighbors and co-workers to serve together. The opportunity to go off to war with familiar faces was a major draw for the early recruits. For example, the "Accrington Pals" had over 1,000 men volunteer in just 10 days in September 1914.[^3]
Large numbers of patriotic teenagers also lied about their age in order to enlist. Even without modern ID checks, the fresh-faced boy soldiers often stood out in group photographs. It‘s estimated that around 250,000 underage soldiers served in the British Army during World War 1.[^4] This included boys as young as 13 or 14, like Reginald Earnshaw, who was killed at the Somme shortly after his 15th birthday.[^5]
The prewar British Army had been an all-volunteer professional force. But the realities of mass industrialized warfare soon outstripped this model. Conscription was introduced in January 1916 for single men aged 18 to 41, and extended to married men a few months later. Ireland was initially excluded, though this was a contentious issue. By the end of the war, roughly 51% of British soldiers were volunteers and 49% were conscripts.[^6]
After enlistment came a period of training at bases in the UK before deployment to the front. But with such a rapid expansion, the Army was often hard-pressed to provide adequate facilities, uniforms and equipment. Some soldiers had to drill in civilian clothes and train with wooden mock-ups before real rifles became available.[^7] Basic training typically lasted around 12 weeks, but could be as short as 8 weeks during times of urgent need for replacements at the front.[^8]
In the Trenches
The cheerful optimism of the early recruits was quickly dispelled by the harsh realities in the trenches. The Western Front had largely settled into a stalemate by late 1914, with the German advance halted but neither side able to make much progress. Trench warfare would dominate the British experience for most of the next four years.
Life in the trenches was a squalid and tedious experience punctuated by periods of sheer terror. Soldiers typically rotated between front line trenches, support trenches, and reserve lines a few kilometers behind. In a quiet sector, a unit might expect to spend 10 days a month in the front line, and another 10 in support, with the remainder in reserve.[^9] During major battles, they could be moved up to spend 30 days or more in the front lines.
Trench conditions were often appalling – damp, unsanitary, infested with rats, lice, and the ever-present stench of decay. Corpses buried in the trench walls would be unearthed by shellfire. "Trench foot", caused by prolonged exposure to damp conditions, was a persistent problem. Careful rotation and regular dry socks were vital. Other common ailments included dysentery, influenza, trench fever, and lice.[^10]
A typical daily routine in quiet sectors would start with "stand-to" before dawn, with everyone on high alert in case of enemy attack. After sunrise came the "morning hate", with both sides often conducting desultory shelling and small arms fire. Daylight hours were filled with chores like repairing trenches and barbed wire, digging latrines, and filling sandbags, as well as sentry duty and short rest breaks. Nightfall brought more laborious chores like stringing barbed wire in no-man‘s land, with the constant threat of illumination by flares. Sleep was snatched in dugouts and shelters prone to flooding and collapse.[^11]
Food was adequate in quantity if not always quality. Army rations typically consisted of tinned meat ("bully beef"), hard biscuits, tea, sugar, and few vegetables. Parcels from home helped, with items like chocolates, cigarettes, and cakes. Soldiers supplemented their diets by foraging or purchasing what they could from local farmers. Rum rations were valued as one of the few comforts.[^12]
The Strain of Combat
Of course, all of these hardships paled in comparison to the experience of combat. Artillery fire caused the large majority of casualties, pulverizing the landscape and human bodies alike. Even when not causing direct casualties, the noise and concussion of constant shelling frayed nerves. Poison gas added a terrifying new dimension, with soldiers struggling into awkward gas masks to avoid an agonizing death. Machine guns also took a fearsome toll, mowing down advancing infantry.
The full brutality of industrialized warfare was on display during the major British offensives like the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917. On July 1st, 1916, the first day of the Somme, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, including around 20,000 deaths.[^13] This was the bloodiest single day in British military history. Entire units were decimated in a matter of hours. The Accrington Pals, who had marched off to war so eagerly together, lost 235 men killed and 350 wounded in the first half hour of the assault.[^14]
After 141 days, the Somme Offensive finally ground to a halt in November 1916. The British and French had advanced only about 6 miles, and suffered over 600,000 casualties.[^15] It would take decades for the last bodies to be recovered from the churned moonscape of the battlefield.
The mental strain of combat took a heavy toll. "Shell shock" was the term coined to describe the psychological trauma experienced by many soldiers. Symptoms included uncontrollable shaking, terrifying nightmares, sudden blindness or paralysis, amnesia, and vivid flashbacks.[^16] While recognized by many doctors, shell shock was still stigmatized, with some soldiers accused of cowardice or malingering. Hundreds of men were "treated" with electric shocks, solitary confinement, or disciplinary methods.[^17] It‘s estimated that the British Army diagnosed 80,000 cases of shell shock, but the true number was likely far higher.[^18]
The Final Year
For the British soldier, 1918 brought new challenges and ultimate victory, but at a terrible cost. The German Spring Offensive, beginning in March 1918, saw the Allies pushed back and the BEF suffer some 236,000 casualties.[^19] Reinforcements were urgently rushed to the front, with some troops being sent into battle with minimal training. Men who had survived the earlier bloodbaths found themselves thrown back into the fray.
But despite the crisis, there was no option but to carry on. As one anonymous soldier wrote in his diary: "We are weary of war, weary of the strain, weary of the mud, weary of the sight of dead men and desolate landscapes. But if the enemy is to be beaten, then beat him we must."^20
The pendulum swung back in the Allies‘ favor over the summer, as American troops arrived in increasing numbers, and British and French forces perfected new infantry and artillery tactics. During the Hundred Days Offensive, the Allies advanced further and faster than ever before on the Western Front. But the casualties were still appalling – the BEF lost around 411,000 men in this period.[^21]
When the Armistice finally came into effect at 11am on November 11th, 1918, it found British troops pushing into Belgium, sometimes against stiff resistance right until the final moments. George Edwin Ellison, the last British soldier killed in action, was shot near Mons at 9:30am, just 90 minutes before the end.[^22]
A Shattered Generation
After more than four years of unimaginable sacrifice, the guns had fallen silent at last. Britain and its empire had deployed over 8.9 million personnel during the war, including nearly 6 million from England alone.[^23] Of those, around 700,000 British soldiers were killed, 1.7 million wounded, and 170,000 taken prisoner.[^24] Roughly 8.7% of the entire British male population aged 15-49 died.[^25]
The losses meant that nearly every community across Britain was in mourning. The Cenotaph in London, originally built from wood and plaster for the Peace Day celebrations in July 1919, was reconstructed in Portland stone as the national war memorial, with the inscription "The Glorious Dead". Every town and village had its own memorial listing the names of the fallen.
Soldiers who did return often faced a difficult homecoming. Many bore the scars of war, both visible and invisible. Around 41,000 British soldiers lost one or more limbs.[^26] Thousands more suffered from what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). With so many men killed or disabled, women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers to replace them. Now many of those women were displaced to make way for returning veterans.
And the old world that the soldiers had left in 1914 was gone forever. The optimism and innocence of that distant summer had vanished. Britain was victorious, but utterly exhausted and nearly bankrupt. The psychic scars would linger for a generation and beyond. As Vera Brittain, who served as a nurse during the war and lost her fiancé, brother, and several close friends, wrote in her memoir Testament of Youth:
"When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans."[^27]
That sentiment doubtless resonated with many of the surviving British soldiers as well. The war had disrupted their lives, their relationships, their sense of self. It made some into heroes, but broke others in body and spirit. It was, as the poet Wilfred Owen wrote so unforgettably in "Dulce et Decorum Est", an experience "obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud".[^28] The British Tommy had endured it all and helped secure victory, but the price paid was unimaginably high.
[^1]: Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (1998), p116[^2]: The Long, Long Trail: The British Army in the Great War
[^3]: Andrew Jackson, Accrington‘s Pals: The Full Story (2013), p18
[^4]: Richard van Emden, Boy Soldiers of the Great War (2012), p326
[^5]: Van Emden, p10-12
[^6]: The Long, Long Trail: Conscription
[^7]: Alan Wakefield & Simon Moody, Under the Devil‘s Eye: Britain‘s Forgotten Army at Salonika 1915-1918 (2004), p36
[^8]: John Lewis-Stempel, The War Behind the Wire: The Life, Death and Glory of British Prisoners of War, 1914-18 (2014), p30
[^9]: Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (2004), p123
[^10]: Holmes, p274-282
[^11]: Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (1971), p51-52
[^12]: Holmes, p282-283
[^13]: William Philpott, Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century (2009), p392
[^14]: Jackson, p223
[^15]: Gary Sheffield, The Somme: A New History (2003), p68
[^16]: Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (2002), p1-2
[^17]: Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (2002), p76-81
[^18]: Report of the War Office Committee of Inquiry into "Shell-Shock" (1922), p92
[^19]: David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (2011), p42 [^21]: Stevenson, p401-402
[^22]: Shane B. Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (2004), p131
[^23]: War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914–1920 (1922), p363
[^24]: Statistics of the Military Effort, p237
[^25]: Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (1985), p71
[^26]: Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men‘s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996), p33
[^27]: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933)
[^28]: Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (1920)
