at least 67 men between October 1916 and August 1917.
This disparity was partly due to the reckless way in which the British army had recruited men without consideration of their mental and physical stamina. It was also accounted for by the fact that the British army retained no less than 25 offences for which the penalty was death. Some of these, such as ‘imperilling the success of His Majesty’s forces’, gave the courts wide powers. General Haig, who confirmed every sentence, believed that the firing squads were essential to maintaining discipline, and repeatedly demanded that Australian soldiers be made to face them. But the Australian government resisted Haig’s pleas, in the confident knowledge that their infantrymen were widely acknowledged to be the best anywhere on the Western Front.12
All information about military executions was concealed from the British public. The government would not even tell the House of Commons how many soldiers were being shot, because publishing such figures was ‘contrary to the public interest’. No one, not even next of kin, was permitted to know anything of the court-martial proceedings, and British soldiers had no right of appeal against a death sentence.
The army used firing squads to set an example to soldiers who needed one. Proclaimed throughout the army, executions were often staged before troops of the condemned man’s unit. It was thus made clear to his comrades that it wasn’t only murderers and rapists who were executed, it was exhausted men who closed their eyes, and men who refused to do the impossible. As the war went on, and ever younger conscripts were sent to the trenches, parents worried about how their sons would endure the ordeal. As stories of executions gained wider currency, the under-secretary for war admitted that there was great public anxiety, and questions by members of parliament, about whether wounded or ‘shell-shocked’ men were being executed, were met by outright lies. In the debate on 17 April 1918, several members, including serving officers, urged the government to change court-martial procedures so that an officer with some sort of legal training should be available to defend a soldier accused of a serious offence, and to ensure that all presidents of the court had previous experience of evaluating evidence. Even these modest reforms were denied.13
In February 1919 the most senior of the official historians spent an evening with Douglas Haig, dining and studying the maps and papers. ‘Why did we win the war?’ Haig asked him.14 No one knew. But after the war Haig had demanded, and got, a massive cash hand-out. He was also presented with a mansion overlooking the River Tweed, where he carefully revised his memoirs. No matter what lengths he went to in rewriting history, Haig was never forgiven for what he had done. Nor was it forgotten. There was no wild cheering in public places when war was declared on Sunday 3 September 1939. The ‘Great War’ and the dead in Flanders were still very much in the minds of the survivors from all nations.
The world after the First World War
Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, said in 1917: ‘War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.’ For France that was true. As in the war to come, she emerged victorious only because the United States entered the war on the Allied side. Her provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were returned to her, and French troops occupied Germany’s Rhineland and Saar. But the victory was a sham. The northern region of France had been the heart of its industrial strength, and after many battles had been fought there, it was devastated. France was bankrupt and deeply in debt. Jules Cambon, a French diplomat, saw the drastic decline in fortunes and wrote: ‘France victorious must grow accustomed to being a lesser power than France vanquished.’
Germany had fought and survived the combined forces of Britain, France, the USA, Italy and Russia. The Fatherland was intact, and fighting had not brought destruction to any region of Germany, which even in defeat remained the strongest power in Europe. Germany’s population of 70 millions was growing, while France’s population of 40 millions was static. Within a decade of the peace treaty there would be twice as many Germans reaching military age each year as Frenchmen. Furthermore Germany’s potential enemies were weakened; by internal strife (Russia), by division into smaller units (Austria-Hungary); by impoverishment (Britain and France), or by concern for their own affairs (USA).
The sacrifices they had made persuaded the French people that they alone had won the war, and their government did nothing to correct this false impression. The Canadians buried at Vimy Ridge, the British sailors lost at sea, Australians and New Zealanders who had fallen at Gallipoli, the Indian Corps which had frozen at Armentières in the first winter of the war, Americans killed at Champagne and Argonne, all these were forgotten. Her allies became bitter at what they considered a lack of gratitude, and the Anglo-Saxon nations moved into isolation and away from friendship with France. The French thought the world was being too kind to the Germans, and began to regard themselves as the sole guardians of the Versailles treaty. For this reason the French army was never to be short of men or money.
Versailles – the peace treaty
The treaty the great powers signed in 1919 to end the First World War remains one of the most controversial historic documents of the twentieth century. The American President Wilson arrived in Europe with his own programme for a lasting peace. We will never know if his ideas were sound, for his Allies would have nothing to do with his ‘Fourteen Points’. Georges Clemenceau said: ‘Mr Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty only had ten.’ Some said Wilson’s proposals were altruistic. Certainly there was nothing benevolent about the twisted political wrangling of the European politicians, but the treaty that finally emerged was not vindictive compared with Germany’s peace with France in 1871 or the terms Germany inflicted upon Lenin’s Russia in 1917.
In postwar Germany, politicians made much of the £1,000 million charged to Germany in reparations. Less was said about the £1,500 million loaned to her by Britain and the United States. The peace terms laid down that Germany could have an army no bigger than 100,000 men and must not build or buy tanks, submarines and aircraft. Few Germans recognized that this would aid their economic recovery; rather it was seen as an insulting and unreasonable order that had to be flouted and eventually rectified.
Perhaps the path to true democratic government would have proved more certain had the monarchy been maintained. Certainly a hereditary monarchy makes it more difficult for tyrants like Hitler to become the head of state.15 As it was, Germany’s postwar democratic government – the Weimar Republic – was ridiculed as a puppet regime that implemented the forceful terms of the victors.
The most far-reaching effects of the peace treaty were the frontiers it drew. Austria-Hungary was split into pieces by the victors. The lines scrawled across the map cared nothing about consigning large numbers of Germans to live under foreign governments. Eventually, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, these vociferous expatriate communities were orchestrated and used by Hitler as an excuse for invasion.
Soldiers go home
At the end of the Great War the armies went home, and it was the attitudes and actions of these returning soldiers which created the world that went to war in 1939. Virtually all the men returning from the battlefields were to some extent cynical and embittered as they compared what they and their comrades had suffered with what others, less worthy, had gained. Most of the veterans’ associations – from the Croix de feu in France to Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain – were anti-Communist. Communists had conspicuously associated themselves with pacificism and anti-militarism. Returning soldiers despised the men who had stayed at home preaching against the war.
Despite its new democratic government, a defeated Germany was convulsed in a series of localized revolutions as left-wing and right-wing political groups fought for power. There were violent uprisings in many German cities and for
