GRANDPA and the FIRST WORLD WAR

The other day I was sorting some family papers and came across Grandpa’s birth certificate. He was born in 1892 and twenty two years later in 1914, he would have been old enough to volunteer for the British army in the First World War. Luckily for him, he never signed up despite the very public campaign calling for volunteers. Nor was he called forward after 1916 when following the disastrous Battle of the Somme, when, after so many troops had been killed, the Army was again short of cannon fodder. Volunteers were not coming forward in the numbers they had in 1914. The only answer was for the Government to introduce conscription for all British male citizens except the Irish who at the time were engaged in a civil war with the British. Twenty three years later in 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany to protect Poland, Grandpa was 47 and although he was not too old to be called up his work at the gas works gave him exemption from conscription. Luckily for me he was not destined to be a hero – dead or alive in either war, otherwise I might not be here to write this article.

There is a saying that history is always written by the winners, that is not to say that Britain was the outright winner of either world wars but it was on the winning side in both. It can be assumed that by 2011 all of the servicemen who were actively engaged in the First World War were dead. Once centenarian Harry Patch, the last known British serving survivor, had passed on, so the November ceremony in London of remembering the dead of WW1 lost a little of its significance. Harry was not a General or even an officer nor was he a senior member of the Government, he was a male citizen of the UK who did not have even have the vote when he was conscripted into the army. He went on to serve actively in the trenches as a machine gunner and survived whilst comrades around him were mown down. He died in his bed a staunch pacifist in 2009. He would have known little about the politics of the war, he had been issued with a khaki uniform and he had put it on. The enemy soldiers he had mowed down were aiming to kill him.

Maybe now in the twenty first century it is be possible to review the history of the First World War without being blinded by nationalistic fervour of Government inspired jingoist propaganda. It would be insensitive to analyze the rights and wrongs of a war whilst the soldiers who fought it and who watched their mates give their lives for the cause were still alive. However when examined with the benefit of hindsight, the First World War was an absolute disaster for all concerned. There was a massive loss of life, none of the objectives were achieved and by the end of the war the way had been cleared for Hitler to come to power in Germany in the 1920s & ‘30s. It is not evident even now that Austria had started the war because the leaders of the other belligerent nations on both sides had all joined in to the bun fight with indecent haste. History of this period reads as though the Emperors and the Generals were looking forward to a punch up. Words like : ‘God’,’ King’, ‘Country’, ’Honour’ were bandied about as justification for going to war which was to be thought of as something akin to a modern international football match except that some of the players would be killed or mutilated.

In 1914 Britain was a class riven society divided roughly into the aristocratic and rich; the comfortable aspiring middle class and the poor labouring masses. One doffed one’s hat to one’s superiors in an era when moving from a lower class upwards was difficult although not impossible. But it would be the lower classes who died en masse in this war. In the very beginning they had volunteered to escape the monotony of their every day life on the farm or in the factory but as time went by they were being conscripted mostly, against their will, to fill the empty ranks. This war was to bring home the destructive power of the machine gun, the agony of poison gas, the destruction wreaked by the artillery shell and the aerial bomb. For the majority of the British soldiers the war was to be fought in the sticky gooey mud of Flanders. Some others went to Africa, some died in the mountains of Northern Italy, some in vast plains of Russia and some in the Middle East. In a world war, the soldier and the sailor could die for one’s country anywhere on the globe. There was no glory just sacrifice and most of it useless. In France the forward line of trenches called the Western Front did move but rarely for more than a few miles at the time. Sometimes the Germans moved forwards, later the Allies moved forwards back to where they had been in the first place. The shattered bodies of the dead remained in no man’s land rotting where they had fallen.

Just before the war had broken out, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey had made great play of the fact that the British were signed up to a 75 year old treaty to defend the sovereignty of Belgium. It was said that the UK also had a moral obligation to go in times of need to the aid of France, a neighbouring country which has not always been keen to see the British interfere in their politics. This aristocrat Grey had in fact secretly signed as Foreign Secretary an agreement with the French to support them should there be a war with Germany.

The Germans were very surprised to find out that the British had declared war especially about an old treaty which they too had signed at the time. It made no difference that the supreme Leader of Germany, The Kaiser, an officer in the British Army, was a cousin related to Britain’s King George V and also a cousin of Tsar Nicholas. Previously Kaiser Bill had regularly visited England to stay with Grandma - Queen Victoria who spoke German at home with her German husband Prince Albert. But the Kaiser was bent on uniting Germany into a formidable power with an overseas empire comparable with that of his cousins the British. Invading Russia would bring land to the East and fighting France would reduce the competition in moulding together an empire in both Africa and Asia to which aim the Kaiser had built a fleet of battleships.

It fell upon the British Prime Minister Asquith to advise King George to declare war on his cousin on the 4th August 1914, which came as quite a surprise to the Kaiser. Later on King George Vth felt it appropriate to change his family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.

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