WWI: Smile, Boys, That's the Style!

 The title here is a line from the First World War song "Pack up Your Troubles" [Link].  "Style": it was an aspect of WWI that distinguished it from other wars.  Why?  That single word was one of the deadliest of the war.  "Style" was a distillation of the blind optimism defining the nations at that time, and it dressed the innocence of their younger generation as they marched off to die.

Picture in your mind what a World War I soldier looks like.  You might come up with an image of a soldier in a "battle bowler" -- the broad-brimmed tin hat that the English Tommy and, later, the American Doughboy wore. Or perhaps the steel coal-scuttle helmet the Germans wore and that you see in German recruitment posters of the day.

However, when the war started in August of 1914, and until well into 1915, the armies valued the previous centuries' sensibilities for style: brightly colored pants and coats, bright buttons, feathered helms, shiny swords, and long, shiny bayonets.

French Style: "Can You See Me NOW?"  (source: wikimedia)

Wartime novels made a point to satirize the naivete behind this deadly preference for style, as in All Quiet on the Western Front where the German sergeant Himmelstoss demands polished buttons among other stylish mandates. But he's never been to the front and has no practical sense of how to survive in the trenches.  Adhering strictly to the manual, he can't teach the young trainees to use a shovel instead of a bayonet in a hand-to-hand trench fight, something that would do much more in keeping them alive.

Only well into the war did the command come to understand that Style was at the center of one of the war's absurdities.  At the outset of the war, you would find the French in bright red pants, a blue coat, and a red cap. The British troops wore a cloth cap with a small leather bill.  And the Germans wore either a cloth cap or the pickelhaube, with its shiny spike atop the helmet made of leather imported from Argentina [Link].  The pickelhaube had, before the war, acquired a drab, cloth cover.  Why? Because the shine on the spike, like the French army's red cap, made an easy target for snipers.  But still: cloth and leather?  Both are easily penetrated in a metal maelstrom.

 British Cloth Caps (and One Head Wound): Nothing Bounces Off

 

German Pickelhaubes and Cloth Caps

None of these caps offered protection from the shrapnel shells.  Shrapnel were small (usually lead) balls that burst from a flying shell (an exploding container) just above the heads of soldiers. It would burst about thirty feet above ground by way of a "fuse cap" that timed the explosion to occur after the shell left the cannon.  When it exploded, its cargo of lead balls flashed out, penetrated the cloth and leather of the caps, and pierced the soldiers' flesh and smashed bones.

Shrapnel: Have a Ball! (Source: Metal Detecting World)

Also fierce were the steel fragments from high explosive shells.  The thicker walls of these hardened steel shells would fragment upon explosion and send razor-sharp shards, large and small, spinning through the air (and through anything in its way); as with shrapnel, fragments flew at about twice the speed of sound.

Of course, these shells simply added to the destruction that bullets and grenades could produce through a cloth cap.

So after 1915 and only after an inordinate number of casualties due to head wounds, the bright idea was to use metal helmets. Thinking of this plan over a year after the war began seems a bit late in the party.  I mean, think of it: the Greeks, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, medieval knights, the Spaniards -- and who not -- had used metal helmets in war.  There's a famous scene in the Iliad of Hecktor playing with his son, who, a moment before, whimpered in fright at the sight of his father in his helmet.  Every French, German, and English soldier had learned about helmets when they were school boys -- as did their generals.

In essence, soldiers of WWI were sent out in cloth caps, as to a playground outing, with the apparent aim to out-style one another. And this in confronting not broadswords, battle-axes, and arrows, but the new machines of war that outpaced the medical technology to put the poor, wounded Humpties back together again.

 

British Brodie Helmets at the Somme, left; German Helmets and Gas Masks, right.

The French also reviewed what expediency required to keep their Poilus ("hairy") soldiers alive and produced a helmet.

The French Adrian

This deadly and inane preference for style over practicalities showed itself in other aspects of the war, but none perhaps as profoundly as sending men to fight against flying bits of metal in cloth hats.

Undue attention for style can occur in current wars, but perhaps not quite to the degrees seen in WWI.  We seem, happily, to lack that too-innocent sense of style.

But one thing stands distinct and clear about the First World War: beyond the absence of plain common sense in using cloth caps from the very start of the war, beyond the crime of sending men to live and die in the spirit-sapping mud, beyond the homicidal blindness of sending men to crawl out of the earth and attack in a line across open ground without any cover, there was something morally disgusting about insisting that they do these things while giving undue attention to style.

Pierre: It Wasn't Paris

 Pierre

Pierre was one of my great uncles, brother to my grandfather.  It is said that he had restless feet, and after serving in the First World War, he would disappear for some years and then suddenly reappear.

I understand the question that troubled some people about this well-loved uncle (and about other young men who went to France during the war), but it was a relatively shallow question: "How you going to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?" -- as the WWI song put it.  The real question was probably a bit deeper for Pierre as it was for other soldiers returning home.  It wasn't Paris, where they spent some leave time -- with the wine, women, and song -- that caused them to be unsettled when they returned home from war.

Pierre enlisted the day after the US declared war on Germany.  One record states that he was the first in his community to enlist and "probably the first in his county"(Pocahontas Record) -- and the day he enlisted was his birthday: 15 April 1917.  Certainly he was, like so many young men of the First World War, tied up with ambition, ardent dreams of "some desperate glory" as one poet said, and...he wanted adventure.  Adventure, he may have thought -- like most of us have thought -- would come easily to hand, light up life like a carnival, and then leave us to return home to settle down.

Then there were the trenches, the shelling, the machine guns, and the friends whom one saw fall -- the friends that one survived.  So Pierre didn't come home with the same fireworks in his mind that most Americans saw on the 4th of July.  The fireworks he saw recalled a different reality.

He was in the Vosges where the German army had long before established trenches in the mountains.  Pierre's unit, at this time under command of the French, was sent to hold the line in the Gerardmer sector, in the mountain pass of Schlucht (Col de la Schlucht).

 Col de la Schlucht: Now a Ski Resort.... (source: Michelin)

One unit history has it that, among many other things they did, the German artillery shelled the American field kitchens that had been set up by some fresh-water streams, knowing that they could kill their enemy as they came to get water and cook food for their men.  Dastardly -- but it was war as it is now or at any other time.... In a game of kill-or-be-killed, who has ever played nice?  War isn't like that despite the so-many rules of engagement set up by politicians well behind the lines.

French (red) and German (blue) Lines in the Schlucht (Pierreswesternfront)

His unit, Company C of the 11th Infantry Regiment, was pulled back briefly, put into further training, and then sent (now strictly under American instead of French command) into the Meuse-Argonne while that battle was raging.  He spent the last days of the war pursuing the Germans in their retreat, up to the 11th Nov., the Armistice.  One event during this time involved his company moving to the east, swimming the Loison river, and emerging to capture the French village of Jamtez from the Germans.

The French Village of Jametz, East of the Loison River (Google Maps)

 

Jametz, France August 2014 (Source: Author)

On 11 July 1918, Pierre had written to his mother (note: brackets indicate my editions/guesses to somewhat garbled text):

My last letter was written just before entering the trenches the first time. Since then we have been in the trenches most of the time. Our first trip was in a different sector than we now hold. We spent our first period there [and then] were relieved and brought directly here so we have really spent most of that time in the trenches. Will be glad when we are relieved and taken back for a rest.  Trench life is not so bad where there is lots going on to [provide] plenty of excitement. We have had a real time with rats in the dug out. They are braver than any Huns that ever lived and there is sure some army of them. There are a million things I would like to tell you about but will have to wait until I return. I hope that won't be long, for the sooner we lick the Germans and get back to the good old States the better we all will feel.  I hope Gen. Pershing ... is right when he said it was either "heaven, hell or Ho-boken by winter." (Pocahontas Record 10 Nov. 1938, p. 16)

 Pierre continued his description of events in another letter to his father:

Aug. 9, 1918  Dear Dad:  Am out of the ditches now for a few days. Was relieved the sixth. Twas an awful night raining and dark as hell. The artillery and machine guns were very active right at the time our relief came in. I could hardly talk loud enough to make the fellows relieving me understand the orders of the sector. But at last I got them straightened out, ...I got my platoon together and started out. Well I hadn't gone over three hundred yards before half of them were lost. It took some little time to find them. And when I got them back, I had every one take hold of hands and follow me one behind the other. That way we got along pretty well but t'was 2:30 a. m. before we made it out. We spent ten days in the trenches this trip.  Our worst trouble is going in and out and of course moving from place to place. I'll tell you it takes guts to put your old pack on your back which consists of all a man's belongings and hit out down the road. There has been times when I'd think I couldn't take another step but I'd always reach our destination and I suppose I could go much farther if necessary. There's no use telling if [it's as hard a life as we think. It's tough not to think of it all the time in war.]  And after we get a good meal and a little rest we forget it all and are ready to start again.  We get good treatment and good eats so that is all that a man can expect at a time and a place like this. In other words we are getting along fine. (ibid.)

Shifting men, who get lost in the maze of trenches at night under bombardment and machine gun fire....  Yes, well: the effects don't soon wear off.  It was the American author and WWI ambulance driver Malcolm Cowley who perhaps best described the lasting effects:

We didn't want to be slackers, embusques. The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom, a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter.  There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week.  The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. (Exile's Return p. 42).

"How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?"  It's not Paris that made them restless.  It's what lies between you in Paris on leave and your buddies left dead in the fields.

Hemingway put it this way, using an old barn and a grove of hemlock as metaphors for lost innocence:

We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn.  The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been.  You could not go back. (Farewell to Arms, qtd in Cowley p. 46).

The beginning of next month, August 2014, marks the centenary of the beginning of WWI.  The more we understand about it, the more we will understand Pierre's -- and other veterans' -- seemingly odd behaviors, their silence about the war, their restless feet, their need to sit in a room facing the door, what they see sometimes when they stare, and their simple desire for normalcy.

Merci, Pierre.  You carried the weight of trying to set a portion of civilization right.  And you carried the loss of friends.  It was a lot of weight to carry in silence because no one -- other than another veteran -- could quite understand it.