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Remembrance
These were the lines, lovely, elegiac, lapidary, from Lawrence Binyon’s For the Fallen (1914) that proclaimed a promise designed to resonate through the ages:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
The caravan moves on: We still remember the Great War, but the men who fought it have faded from view, names perhaps on a memorial, and maybe even a wisp of a family memory, but, for the most part now, the understanding of who they were is gone.
But then there is the story of Bob Smethurst, a dustman, as the Brits say. As he worked his round, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, photos of that conflict began to appear in the trashcans he emptied.
The Daily Telegraph reports:
[Smethurst] believes as soldiers from the conflict grew old and passed away a lot of their remarkable pictures and memorabilia was often thrown out especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Over three decades Mr Smethurst made it his mission to try and save anything he spotted which otherwise could have been lost forever. Mr Smethurst, from Sussex, now has more than 5,000 photographs capturing everything from the horror of the trenches to haunting images of young friends smiling together before battle….
Take a look for yourself, and see what you think.
A face, a grin, a grimace, no more than that, anonymous more often than not, but a trace that was thrown out and could have been lost, but will now endure. Imperfectly, yes, but we will remember them.
Thank you, Mr. Smethurst.
Published in General
Neat. Thanks.
That fourth picture is as brutal and instructive a summary as I’ve seen. But, to be honest, I don’t remember seeing that many pictures of the first World War.
Andrew, Smethurst, and the Telegraph are all English, and the First World War was a bigger deal there, with 2.2% of the population dying instead of 0.1%, and commensurately greater financial costs and social traumas. As such, pictures are a little more common.
What narrative do you see in the 4th picture? If it is, as the caption suggests, a photograph taken in a captured trench, then it is a useful reminder that the war was slightly more mobile than people often believe today, and obviously pictures of the dead remind one that people died, but I didn’t see much more.
The littered dead in a trench, captured or not. In movies and photographs, trenches are usually shown with soldiers fighting… an occasional dead or wounded man, but most are either up and fighting or resting between charges. This picture is more concerned with the aftermath.
Though fantasy, the most moving image of battle I have seen in cinema is from LOTR, during the battle at Helm’s Deep. Being struck by a mortal blow, a man ceases to concern himself with chaotic action around him and instead focuses on the endless bodies of dead men which he is about to join. That’s what this image of WWI reminds me of.
My main impression of WWI has always been the waste of lives in anachronistic strategies of war. I wonder if trench warfare was indeed strategically respectable or if aristocratic generals simply didn’t think much of the commoners under their stewardship.
It is worth remembering that officers, including the social equals of the generals, suffered far higher casualty rates than did the enlisted men.
Trench warfare was not anachronistic; it was unprecedented; there are very few wars, perhaps none, in which the tactics changed so much over the course of each year. In August 1914, the war looks a lot like a 19th century war, albeit with German atrocities that are uglier than in 19th century European wars. By the Somme in 1916, the Allies had wrested air superiority from the Germans and were fighting with tanks.
Trenches saw a continual front line for miles upon miles, across the entire frontier, with soldiers spending a relatively short amount of time at the front before being cycled back to more comfortable living. That kind of massive logistical challenge and concern for the wellbeing of the troops was simply unheard of. Total war was many things, but not old fashioned.
Well, that shows how little I really know about it, then. Thanks.
The trenches themselves were unprecedented. But it reminds me of phalanxes of musketeers taking turns shooting at each other and Civil War charges across open fields.
Perhaps it’s just difficult to imagine firearm warfare without the factors of airplanes and fast transport vehicles.
Holy ####. Both my Scottish grandfathers fought in WWI. Both survived. My father’s father returned to Scotland and his wife, promptly had four children, then died in1927 when the baby was only months old. There aren’t too many pictures of him, but enough for me to be almost certain he is in this picture. I would know that smirk anywhere, my dad had it, my brother has it, and son #3, who shares Sam’s name and birthday has it. The good looking guy, right in the middle. With the smirk.
Phalanxes and musketeers might seem similar at the moment of the attack, but wars involving Phalanxes and musketeers involve armies that come into contact having a brief battle, with one side or the other losing, and then another bout of mobility. They also involved far smaller numbers.
One of the many ways that industrial warfare was new was that the front lines were in place for months, or even years. The armies were massively larger, and fighting was not restricted to a military season. As you suggest, the invention and development of military aircraft and vehicles was enormous. Plus, the Germans kept things interesting by going through the list of war crimes (also a new concept, from 1899) and gradually doing everything they’d promised not to (eg. butchering civilians in Belgium, sinking neutral ships without the opportunity to surrender, gas, Parisian civilian shelling using enormous superguns and the naval bombardment of Britain, and launching civilian air raids).
In 1914, soldiers learned how to communicate with their opposite numbers well enough that they could pretend not to see each other on patrols, and found other ways to make fighting less intense, which had not been a phenomenon in previous wars, because contact wasn’t that extended. Famously, this resulted in the Christmas truce, where they sang carols and played soccer. The Germans responded to this by creating stormtroopers, who would find out where these mini-truces existed and use them to set ambushes; hence the lack of a Christmas truce in 1915 and subsequently.
There’s just so many new issues and problems, from shell shock to relatively advanced field hospitals to the ability to dig mines in which could be laid explosives that have never been exceeded in power outside the two Japanese nukes. The Armenian Genocide, serious and organized propaganda, and the sheer jaw dropping scale of military invention (compare 1914 unarmed planes to 1918 fighters and bombers) and manufacture showed us what war could be like in the rest of the 20th century. There are a lot of angles to how and why the First World War was different, and that’s just looking at the Western Front.
Incidentally, if people are into this stuff, Mrs. of England works in museums and is putting up a number of exhibitions on the subject this Summer. Anyone visiting South West Scotland could, I’m sure, get a highly informed tour. This offer is, right now, exclusive to Ricochet, so far as I know. I can’t promise I won’t offer her expertize to others in the future, though.
My great grandfather was with the Border Regiment, Annefy. Who did your grandfathers fight with?
Very informative, James. Thanks. If you would recommend a couple books as primers, I would appreciate it.
I have the details at home On a picture I inherited from an uncle. Details to follow.
Do you do Audible? The Great Courses lecture series is a pretty good introduction, covering a wide range of WWI topics. One of the unfortunate things about WWI is the degree to which the good books tend to cover quite narrow aspects of the war. Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914, for instance, is very good on the Eastern Front in 1914, but skims over quite large chunks even of that year. There are good military histories, but most of them are of specific campaigns, and good social histories, but so much was changing that even those tend to be compartmentalized.
If you don’t do Audible and want a good survey book, not too heavy, I’d recommend Paxman’s Great Britain’s Great War; this obviously has a somewhat anglocentric perspective, and is lousy on the Somme. If heavy isn’t a problem, the best book, albeit only covering the beginning of the war, is probably Hew Strachan’s To Arms, which is intended to be the first volume of a trilogy, but may end up standing alone.
If you’re looking for a narrative that depicts the day to day experiences of the war, dipping into some of the classic battles along the way, I highly recommend Tim Cook’s pair of books: “At the Sharp End” and “Shock Troops”, about the Canadian Corps during the war. You get a slightly myopic view, as it only details the actions of four of the roughly two hundred divisions arrayed on both sides of the Western Front, but the zooming in and out between the soldiers’ lives, the tactics, the generals, and the politicians is fascinating.
Thanks. The only first-account I’ve read is “Good-Bye to All That” by Robert Graves, which was assigned by a liberal literature professor.
It’s a group photo (7 rows of 12) . On the top it says: NO 2 SQUADRON, ARMOURED CARS. R.N.A.S. And here’s pic of a newspaper clipping my uncle had taped to the back:
The cutting edge! I’m a little surprised that the Royal Naval Air Service had (at least) 2 armored car squadrons. There’s two kinds of vehicles I associate with the RNAS, and neither of them are land vehicles. Still, while confusing, that’s awesome!
I wish we knew more about him. I know he was a lorry mechanic when he returned to Glasgow. A cousin sent me a picture of his driver’s license from the 20s, it was handwritten and I think the number was only three digits, four at the most.
My my uncle was going to donate the picture I have to a museum, but never did. When he passed away last year his daughter sent it to me; of his 40+ descendants there’s only one named after him, and that’s son #3.
The dominance of Graves and his pals is a very large part of the problem. It’s as if the history of Vietnam was written by a crowd in which stretched all the way from Kerry to Chomsky.
Incidentally, Annefy, if you enjoyed looking at those photos, you might enjoy these from the online section of Mrs. of England’s work (it’s not all her museums, but most of the photos are from Annan, which is hers). They’re not Glaswegian, and I don’t think that any of them are naval, but they’re from a neighboring part of Scotland, so might feature your other grandfather? If you had any questions, she’ll probably read them here, and I can pass them on if not.
I will check it out – thanks so much. My other grandfather (Daniel Marner) was from Greenock. Okay to share the link with relatives? Here’s a side by side of the pictures; confirmed Sam Flanagan on the right; ? on the left. What do you think?