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.