The Impact of War : from World War One to the Present

 

Between 1914 and 1918 the British Empire amassed a force of nearly nine million men to go to war. Ravenous in its need to field soldiers, the dwindling professional British army was soon augmented by reserve forces, conscripts and civilian volunteers.

 
Most had limited to zero military experience and many men who entered service did not return home the same. Changed and often traumatised, the first world war represented a fracture point in soldiers’ personal histories. As a young Lieutenant Godfrey wrote to his mother in 1914, it was a strikingly “different existence” from which no one escaped unaltered.
 
My new book War Bodies focuses directly on this life-changing experience for British men, investigating their personal accounts. It focuses on the immediate and lasting impact of the war upon the bodies of soldiers, building up a mosaic of the physical experience of battle through their testimony. This illustrates the extent to which their physical bodies were perceived, controlled, transformed and abused by army leadership to secure victory.
 
Take Private Silver, a pre-WWI recruit whose diary opens with his delight at his shiny red uniform. Bitter at having to exchange it for khaki in 1914, Silver turned his displeasure to the deplorable state of the food. He also discussed the shelling and fighting in vivid detail, yet one of the events to which he devotes significant space is the injustice of repeated punishment for trench foot in 1915.
 
       ”I told him [the company sergeant] that I had no time to clean the mud off my clothes and my feet were more important so he sentenced me to seven days punishment which meant I had to do more dangerous and dirty jobs than the other lads, including going out into no-man’s land putting out barbed wire and cleaning latrines.”
 
Aggrieved at his treatment, Silver protested the impossibility of adequate sanitary care as directed by the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) while knee deep in mud and freezing water. No amount of whale oil could recover his bleeding feet, ironically worsened by each punishment for the perceived decline in his personal standards. The cycle continued until Silver was effectively crippled. Only once his fighting ability was clearly impaired was the cycle broken, his plight recognised and the punishments replaced with medical care.
 
Silver’s case illustrates a significant issue for many serving men in that the damage his body suffered was nothing to do with fighting the enemy. It was the armed forces he had sworn allegiance to that had continued to cause him harm.
 
As conscripts learned how to fight they became stronger and fitter, yet much of this was undone once they reached the battlefield and were wounded, maimed or killed.

 
As men battled the enemy during the war, they also fought the environments they inhabited, their own physical needs and desires, and crucially for this investigation, the military establishment that chose, trained and fielded them.
 
The battle for control over the British fighting body was often an ugly one, aggravated by the necessity to create soldiers from civilian volunteers and conscripts. Many of these men entered service with expectations and objections to traditional military control that was not the case with standard military recruits.
 
Cases of resistance were numerous, including the story of Private Roberts who led a mini mutiny in 1915 against military command over the deplorable state of the food or the rebellion of a training battalion of Welsh miners who refused to fall out due to a physically abusive officer. In another case, several men escaped through a window in 1916 to avoid unwanted inoculations enforced by their zealous commanding officer.
 
The physical efficiency of the soldier in battle meant significant interference in British soldiers’ bodies by the military. Training and discipline were singularly designed to keep the body fighting. Early responses to cases of shell-shock included directions to physically assault those afflicted in an effort to dispel their stupor. Private Roberts recounted how witnessing a man encouraged to hang himself for his physical weakness was later useful when he worked with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
 
Masculinity and physical ability were intertwined as demonstrations of “manliness” and self-worth became fixated on the body’s ability to fight. So it is unsurprising that the terror-induced paralysis of Private Archer at Ypres in 1917 led to questions of his worth as a soldier and a man. The impacts of these beliefs could be tragically fatal as in the case of wounded veteran Harry Green, who believed his injuries made him a burden on the state and ended his life after returning home in 1917.
 
Few ended the first world war unscarred. Within the experiences of the millions who fought, there are abundant examples of the battle for the body, as the British military demanded more and more from their men to secure victory.
 
Investigating the war through the lens of physical experience is useful and insightful because the price of service was the extreme toll on the body. Much like the toll upon the mental health of serving men, the visible and invisible scars from battle would not fade easily or completely.
 
Weighed and measured, trained and transformed, broken and buried, the war saw the human body pushed beyond endurance as British soldiers who fought interminably long campaigns in intolerable conditions and appalling weather. Many returned home mutilated, shell-shocked, mute or severely disabled, and some not at all. It is through these stories of physical experiences that historians can attempt to understand what existence was truly like for the soldiers of the first world war.
 
How WWI soldiers’ bodies were controlled, transformed and abused to secure victory. By Simon Harold  Walker . The Conversation , November 10, 2020.

 

In 1914, the steady gaze and pointing finger of war minister Lord Kitchener urged the men of Britain that they were all needed to protect their country. A century later in January 2019, the British army channelled this message once more in the latest instalment of its controversial campaign “This is Belonging”, which was duly panned for political correctness.

  
This latest campaign implied that all were needed in uniform, but particularly targeted millennials and Generation Z – youth groups that are all too often mocked and shunned in the media.
 
 Unlike the previous “Be The Best” campaign – the staple for British army recruitment for many years – and the still-used “Born in … made in the Royal Navy” ads, the recent call for “snowflakes” directly engaged with negative perceptions of modern youth culture. Those considered (by themselves or society) as “snowflakes, selfie addicts, class clowns, binge gamers and phone zombies”, were told they had a place in an army that recognises positive qualities in negative stereotypes.
But the original and the homage campaigns bear three core similarities. First of all, they both promote inclusivity while actually adhering to strict and specific criteria. They also target recruits from the fringes of society, and finally, both have been more infamous than successful.
  
Both campaigns had similar issues. Neither in fact were particularly inclusive. Everyone was needed in 1914 – except of course for the thousands who failed to meet certain specific criteria, such as being over the age of 18 (19 when sent to fight), being taller than 5ft 3", and passing a rigorous medical examination – though the last two stipulations were relaxed in the final years of the war when more men were needed.
 
A century later, inclusivity now meant reaching out to millennials for the very reasons their generation is so often disdained. So all welcome – except the 92,559 applicants in 2018 who, due to medical and fitness issues, didn’t make the cut to join the 7,441 recruits who were eventually enlisted. Perhaps some of the millennial gamers it looked to attract simply did not possess the core fitness levels required by the army, suggesting the campaign was too narrow in targeting such people in the first place.
 
After eight consecutive years of recruitment shortage, the 2019 snowflake campaign arrived during a era of questioning the need and purpose of the armed forces. Consistently under target strength since 2000, the rate of trained personnel has been in free-fall. In early 2019, the British Armed forces reported a deficit of 10,000, despite the requirement for personnel decreasing by 27% – down from 190,000 in 2000 to 134,304 today.
 
The socially aware recruitment campaigns of 2018/19 sought to arrest this decline as part of a £1.6m programme focusing on emotions, individuality and specific millennial “types” such as snowflakes.
 
Promoting pastoral care (emotional and spiritual support) and the chance to be an individual, the modern military appeared to offer equality and self-expression and value technological dexterity. A century after the end of World War I, the British army was promoting inclusivity to an extent that Kitchener could never have envisaged.
  
Unashamedly controversial, the snowflake campaign channelled the usual youth-bashing ammunition of raging inter-generational battles. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), and Gen Z (born from the mid 1990s onwards), are often denigrated as lacking in conviction, resilience, work ethic, common sense or restraint. Old vs young rhetoric has encouraged media demonisation of what is seen as a hypersensitive, overly indulged youth culture.
 
In retaliation, these younger generations have criticised the economic decline and political malaise evident in British society since 2000. Recession, environmental crisis, a push toward centre-right politics, Brexit and the rise of populist world leaders have created an anxiety-filled future for them. But with battlelines so clearly drawn, the strength of feeling against the snowflake campaign is unsurprising.
 
Criticism flew from all sides, with accusations of naivety, diminishing standards and underhand recruitment tactics. Charlotte Cooper of Child Soldiers International slammed the release of the campaign during the “January blues”, saying:
 
   “The ‘snowflake’ campaign tried to present a new side to the army, but this advertising brief shows the same old story: young people with the fewest options being mis-sold a one-sided view of military life as the magic ticket to a better life.”
 
An overly positive depiction of military life is a tried and tested method of army recruitment. Kitchener’s increasingly desperate attempts to draw in civilians promised everything from full stomachs to sexual adventures. Again falling standards were decried (and then changed to increase recruitment numbers) as Kitchener’s recruits had their pride and commitment called into question.

 
The British military has always depended on recruiting from the working class. Youth paramilitary organisations dating back to Baden Powell’s early 20th-century scout movement reflected the more accepting and benevolent attitudes to military service that was unthinkable before the Victorian period. No longer seen as “rogues”, soldiering could mean self-reliance, adventure and physical fitness. In the modern forces, enlistees also have access to training, education and development and a sense of purpose and belonging.
 
Both campaigns enjoyed some success with this message. In 1914 millions came forward to join up. In January 2019, recruitment figures doubled. Yet Kitchener’s success is more myth than reality, as the poster appeared in December 1914 at the tail end of the rush, and the beginning of the slog to conscription in 1916. In early 2019, recruitment numbers certainly increased, but in August 2019 official figures confirmed that the army remains 7,000 personnel short of its target.
 
A century on, Britain’s armed forces continue to lose trained fighters and struggle to replace them. In desperation – or perhaps inspiration – the old Kitchener method was given another opportunity to galvanise the country’s youth. Numbers may be up, but only time will tell if it can be sustained.
 
 
Your country still needs you: why the British army is running the same old campaign a century after WWI. By Simon Harold Walker. The Conversation , September 3, 2019.
 

In 1916, a young British private in northern France wrote home to his parents explaining his decision to take his own life. A survivor of the early days of the Somme, considered one of the most brutal battles of World War I, Robert Andrew Purvis apologised to his family before praising his commanding officers and offering the remainder of his possessions to his comrades. Purvis’s surviving suicide note remains one of the only documents of its kind from World War I.

 
Our research into suicide during World War I has shown that it was not uncommon – although reporting of it was rare. For the armed forces, recognition and support for these cases has been a longstanding struggle. From 1923, the Scottish charter for the honour roll of the fallen explicitly forbade the inclusion of suicide cases, which meant that reported cases from World War II were also omitted from the honour roll in the Scottish National War Museum at Edinburgh Castle.
 
A the turn of the 20th century, suicide was often regarded as a symptom of mental illness. Cases of suicide, if recorded at all, were almost always marked as being a case of “temporary insanity”. Britain stood at the forefront of treatment for conflict-related mental illness as the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh became famous for treating shell-shocked soldiers.
 
The hospital evolved to advance the fledgling understanding of conflict-related psychosis and specialised in practical recovery techniques including sports, model-making, writing, photography and the “talking cure” pioneered by psychologist William Rivers.
 
Craiglockhart is also known for treating famous patients, including war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon remains the only recognised war poet to have published on the controversial topic of soldier suicide.
 
Due to the stigma, controversy and inflammatory nature of the topic, discussions surrounding mental health and suicide in the British military were limited for much of the 20th century. Victor Gregg, a serviceman in World War II, recounted in an interview in 2015 how psychological aftercare for demobilised men in 1945 was non-existent, lamenting:
 
    “My brain was filled with images of suffering that were to haunt me for the next 40 years… The final gift from a grateful country was a civilian suit, a train ticket home and about £100 of back-service pay.”
 
Sixty-four years later, fortunately much has changed. At the turn of the 21st century, both the military and governments in the UK have come to recognise the issue of military-related suicide.

 
But despite the increase in mental health awareness and support campaigns for both serving soldiers and veterans over the past two decades, concerns over deaths continue. The Ministry of Defence spends £22m a year on mental healthcare for veterans, with a further £6m annually for support within the NHS. But military charities argue that this is not enough – particularly as focused statistical recording and analysis of veteran suicide cases only began in earnest after 2001.
 
In March 2019, Scottish warrant officer Robert McAvoy, a veteran of 20 years’ service, took his own life. The following month 18-year-old Highlander Alistair McLeish died by suicide at Catterick Garrison in York. These tragedies are by no means unique.
 
In 2018, research by a Scottish newspaper demonstrated that a former member of the forces takes their own life in Scotland every six days. This prompted the Scottish mental health minister Clare Haughey to publicly pledge closer consideration of the mental healthcare of Scottish soldiers and veterans.
 
Concerns over the suicides of 71 British veterans and serving personnel in 2018 led UK defence secretary, Tobias Ellwood, to tell ITV News:
 
     “I’m truly sorry. I’m sorry that they feel the armed forces, NHS, government, have let them down.”
 
This was not an admission of responsibility for a lack of duty of care. It was a poor excuse for an apology which undercut the severity of the issue and role of the establishment within it, by insinuating that the “lack of support given” was a matter of perception. However, Ellwood also admitted: “We must improve.”
 
Suicide is currently the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the Western world – and the concerns of suicide related to service are by not limited to Britain.
 
In the US, 6,000 veterans took their own lives in 2018, on top of the suicides of 275 active service personnel. In the American media and public eye, service and veteran suicide is perceived as a growing issue as cases of mental illness and post-traumatic stress continue to go untreated.
 
Military service and veteran suicide are not new issues, but there are crucial conversations to be had about the subject publicly, politically, socially and medically. Claiming there is a suicide “epidemic” would be an exaggeration as the numbers do not support that kind of term, but the issue remains pertinent and in need of public attention.
 
Bluntly, men and women have died, are dying and will continue to die if society does not examine the issue of military suicide. Only through open discussion, active research and recognition of service and veteran mental health-related deaths can these tragedies be prevented in the future.
 
 
We need to talk about suicide in the military. By Simon Harodl Walker. The Conversation , June 28, 2019.