June 1917 – the only other such councils were at Birmingham and Swansea – was not only almost entirely concerned with mundane issues of daily military life, but also equated grievances with the rights of the citizen. It has been described, indeed, as displaying «pre-eminently the voice of the respectable working man».17 Disturbances at Shoreham in September 1917 were prompted by poor rations, the higher pay of Canadians stationed nearby, and the cancellation of leave trains to Brighton to save fuel. Some attention had been given in earlier years to using chaplains and the YMCA to begin a kind of low-level patriotic instruction. A more formal educational scheme was authorised in February 1918, although not finally implemented until August, by which time the restoration of mobile warfare both limited its effect and its necessity. Trade unionists did emerge much more prominently in the demobilisation disturbances in January 1919. The beginning of demobilisation on 11 January brought the protests rapidly to an end.
Compared to trade unionists, surviving regulars continued to appear prominently in wartime disturbances and suffered a disproportionate number of wartime executions. Under the provisions of the British Army Act, a total of 346 men were executed during the war, of whom 291 were serving with British regiments. In some respects, the application of discipline was harsher in the British than other armies. The British had 27 capital offences in their military code compared to just 11 in the German army, and two in the French army, but the British civilian criminal code was also harsher than that of many continental states. Only 10,8 per cent of death sentences actually imposed by British courts martial on white soldiers were confirmed. Nearly 40 of those executed had previously been sentenced to death once, and two twice previously. Others had previously served, or had had suspended, sentences of imprisonment for capital offences. Although it has been argued that the process was biased against Irishmen, colonial labourers, and those deemed mentally degenerate or «worthless», it should also be noted that standards in the conduct of courts martial differed little from those in pre-war civil courts. It is also the case that there was a decreasing use of the death penalty with the conscious revival in the field, especially among British units serving in Italy, of the concept of «pious perjury» to mitigate the recourse to capital punishment as the army became more dependent upon conscripts.18
Other than mutiny or the disintegration of an army under the pressure of enemy action, the most obvious sign of military collapse was desertion or mass surrender. Surrender could be distinctly risky given the propensity of soldiers to kill rather than take prisoners. Approximately 397 000 British soldiers were captured during the war, around 177 000 of them on the Western Front. While most of the latter were captured in March 1918, the highest proportion of British troops surrendering rather than fighting to the death actually occurred in 1914. As with casualties generally, the fluidity of mobile warfare was more likely to lead to men being cut off and under less supervision than more static warfare. Pre-war regulars and especially recalled reservists were also probably less well prepared for the intensity of conflict than more intelligent, better educated and better prepared wartime volunteers. The near collapse to apathetic surrender of the 1st Royal Warwicks and 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers at St Quentin on 27 August 1914 is well known.
Viewing the military experience in the Great War as a whole, it could be argued that, for those not actually maimed physically or mentally by the war, wartime service had neither an overtly positive nor negative impact. The post-war literature of disillusionment that appeared between 1928 and 1935 represented only a small fraction of the extensive British creative writing that emerged from the war, only one fifth of which was the work of combatants. The British army’s post-war recruitment was relatively buoyant, providing little evidence of any immediate revulsion against matters military. If wartime expansion had little impact on the army as an institution in the longer-term, and whatever the haphazard process by which expansion had occurred during the war itself, citizen soldiers imbued with civilian culture had proved equal to the challenge of conflict.
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