The Horrible Void Between the Trenches

By Dr. Clifton Wilcox

Armies are virtually never ready to fight major wars. Warfare continues to change over time, which means no two wars are exactly alike. Armys leaders struggle to anticipate the next war, yet it is unrealistic to predict with perfection. The advent of new technology and tactics, unexpected adversaries, the vast size and complexity of military organizations, undetectable capabilities, and unforeseen goals signify gaps will exist between the war an army expects to fight and the war it must fight.
Yet, throughout history there has been no army on Earth that has been accused of total unpreparedness than those that went to war in Europe in August of 1914. There is no conflict that more vividly conjures up the image of wasteful military incompetence than the First World War, in which a wholesale chain-of-command on both sides utterly failed to foresee the scale, duration and character of a war transformed by modern weaponry and mass mobilization. The millions cut down among the artillery barrages, machine gun fire and gas clouds have become the quintessential symbol of military unpreparedness and the inability to adapt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503564138

Dr. Clifton Wilcox

Dr. Clifton Wilcox is a professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior. He is the author of eight books and has served as a consultant for the federal government.

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Copyright © 2015 by Dr. Clifton Wilcox.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front Cover Photo: Some rights reserved by nathan17 (License Attribution)

Rev. date: 05/13/2015

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CONTENTS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Cascade of Improvising

The Role of Battlefield Technology

The Human Toll

CHAPTER ONE

A Contemporary Image of War

Situating Trench Culture and Practices

CHAPTER TWO

The Violent Spaces

The Conception of the Western Front

The Invisible Armies

The Need For A New Strategy

The View from Above

Violence without Warning

Conclusion

CHAPTER THREE

Hell on Earth

The Scourge Known as the Western Front

Sisyphean Labors

Hope?

CHAPTER FOUR

The Separation from Violence

Viewing Violence

Active Disengagement

Material Transformation

Singing on the way to the Slaughter

Conclusion

AFTERWORD

At the Intersection of Violence

REFERENCES

Our vocabulary is not adapted to describe such an existence.

Alf Temple Appleby, 1916

Books by Dr. Clifton Wilcox

Scapegoat: Targeted for Blame

Groupthink: An Impediment to Success

Bias: The Unconscious Deceiver

Envy: A Deeper Shade of Green

The Fall of the Kingdom of Northumbria

Witch-Hunt: The Assignment of Blame

Witch-Hunt: The Clash of Cultures

Road to War: The Quest for a New World Order

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Cascade of Improvising

A RMIES ARE PRACTICALLY never ready to fight major wars. Warfare changes over time, which means no two wars are exactly alike. Armies struggle to anticipate the next war, yet it is unrealistic to predict with perfection. New technology and tactics, unexpected adversaries, the vast size and complexity of military organizations, undetectable capabilities, and unforeseen goals signify gaps will exist between the war an army expects to fight and the war it must fight.

There are a multitude of tasks and situations that cannot possibly be tested in peacetime, there are unforeseeable actions of the enemy and the bewildering violence of actual combat, which give all military operations the character of a cascade of improvisations. Armies must therefore evolve in war. Victory, at least in part, depends on how well armies realign pre-war assumptions to address the wartime realities. In other words, war is a composition of experiments, mistakes, adaptations and maneuvers that resolve themselves into ultimate victory or defeat.

Even in peacetime, the military is symbolic of a living organisms, perpetually engaged in reorganization, reform, rearmament, and the replacement of personnel. The military attainment of perfect combat readiness continually gives the impression of either far off or, at best, just around the comer. Yet, throughout history there has been no army that has been accused of total unpreparedness than those that went to war in Europe in August of 1914. There is no conflict that more vividly conjures up the image of wasteful military incompetence than the First World War, in which a wholesale chain-of-command on both sides utterly failed to foresee the scale, duration and character of a war transformed by modern weaponry and mass mobilization. The millions cut down among the artillery barrages, machine gun fire and gas clouds have become the quintessential symbol of military unpreparedness and the inability to adapt.

There is something otherworldly about the Western Front of the First World War that has captured the imagination of novelists, filmmakers, tourists, and historians (amateur and professional alike), among many other people. Some are drawn to the brutality of the trenches; others appreciate the quasi-religious tones of sacrifice, nobility, and duty in times of war; some are attracted by its status as a watershed moment in world history, the birthplace of Total War, the subsequent death-knell for nineteenth century positivism, and the ostensible birth of modernity. Still others see the First World War as the prelude to the greater atrocities of the Second World War. Whatever their motivations, one need only to utter Western Front and most people can easily conjure up an image of muddy holes, years of futile attacks, and millions of dead or maimed. All of these allusions of the Great War are true enough, but lack distinction, rarely taking into account the many hours spent by the soldiers doing very little at all, waiting for attacks that more often than not never came, digging trenches that were never assaulted, and generally being bored. As Reginald Farrer wrote in his 1918 memoir, The Void of War, while contemplating the nearly half-million British casualties of the Somme offensive in 1916:

…[war’s observers] cannot be troubled to notice the ordinary and every day; we reserve our perception for only the salient sensational points—men dying violently, not men living ordinarily.¹

Farrer’s inference is that on the Western Front, the oft-employed metonym to symbolize the overall sense of calamity attached to the First World War, soldiers did attempt to live ordinarily, albeit under rather extraordinary violent circumstances.

While violence and war appear as obvious counterparts, the space in which violence occurs and the resulting effect that space has on the forms of violence employed have been largely ignored as a point of inquiry in First World War historiography. Contemporary historians have generally overlooked the three-dimensional implications of specific forms of violence employed on the Western Front in terms of grand strategy, such as the development of aerial optical surveillance, and in terms of socio-cultural responses to violence of the soldiers on the ground, such as the unique songs arising out of trenches. Yet, the circumstances to which Farrer refers, both the seemingly mundane and the extraordinary, are inherently spatial concerns, occurring within the same space of the Western Front. This book explores the space of the Western Front at the time of war, taking snapshots of institutional, social, and material manifestations occurring within that space, and do so under the unifying rubric of violence which, in a time of war, informed the production of every one of the aforementioned interpretations of space, both implicitly and explicitly.

This book examines that the belligerents’ grand strategy, with its reliance upon high explosives and heavy ordinance, which created a unique set of material conditions on the Western Front, to which the social response of the soldiers was frequently one of being tortured, tormented, and generally subordinated to the seemingly ubiquitous violence of the Front. Yet, even as hell became a common linguistic maxim to describe the trenches as the most awful space imaginable, and where the soldiers also refused to abandon their humanity to the inhuman artillery, and in spite of their hellish surroundings, contends that a broad culture of resistance to violence sprung up amid the trench dwellers.

Increase in technology and its role compounded the problems associated with the costly stalemate in World War I. Technology in the warfare arena is treated as a crucial ingredient in distancing soldiers and society physically and emotionally from the carnage created by modern warfare.

Technology is a constant variable that has influenced the manner in which armies had conducted military operations throughout its history. Yet, technology has been portrayed as a double-edged sword. Simply put, the double-edged sword may be used in a more effective manner than a single-edged sword against one’s enemy, but along with the advantage also comes the increased risk of injuring the individual who wields it.

Historically, technology has been unfairly cast in both the role of the scapegoat and the magical cure for problems, large and small, within armies. Technology is nothing more than a complex tool, which, if used correctly, can save lives and minimize conflict. Technology also brings an awesome responsibility to the army that possesses it.

The Role of Battlefield Technology

World War I (1914-1918) was considered the first mechanized war in military history. The introduction of new technological advancements first led many individuals on both sides of the conflict to the misconception that the war would prove to be short and humane. The war was almost the very opposite of short or humane. The war was lengthy with heavy casualties for all countries engaged in the conflict.

The Industrial Revolution created new technologies such as the machine gun, quick firing artillery, the radio, the plane, poisonous chemicals, petroleum weapons (flamethrower), and eventually the tank. These were some of the new weapon systems that were introduced to the arena of warfare and helped to create a regression into barbarism with the tactics used by the command on both sides in World War I. These new technologies were at first predicted to shorten the length of the war; paradoxically, they instead promoted the terrifying stalemate in the trenches with their misuse.

The incorrect strategic application of the new weapon systems created heavy casualties. The concept that technology would make the hostilities of war more civilized was replaced by the grim reality of World War I. The portrayal of the decline in the human condition caused by the gap between technology and tactics during the Great War was best articulated as:

This high-velocity onslaught of new ideas and technologies seemed to ratify older dreams of a perfectible life on earth, of an existence in which the shocks of nature had been tamed. But the unleashing of unparalleled progress was also accompanied by something quite different: a massive regression toward savagery. If technology endowed humans with Promethean aspirations and powers, it also gave them the means to exterminate one another.²

Technology itself made the nature of World War I even more brutal, but it was the failure to adjust and adapt the military tactics and coordinate the advancements in technology that made the war as hideous and abysmal as it was. World War I was nothing more than a costly and disastrous lesson that took many years to learn. The first years of the war had armies literally pinned in trenches. The commander would give a signal, which was usually a whistle blast, and the attack would begin. The attacking army would jump out of the trench and charge across a space of ground between each entrenched army that was referred to as no man’s land. It was the middle ground where waves of attacking soldiers would be gunned down by machine guns. No army had the claim on this piece of land, hence, the term no man’s land. The following quote elaborates on the concept of the battlefield and the types of tactics used during WW1:

Elaborate systems of interconnecting trenches or ditches were created by both sides, between which ran no-man’s land. The tactics of trench warfare relied on artillery barrages followed by soldiers going over the top from their trenches to charge the enemy. Usually, to be killed or wounded by machine gun fire in no-man’s land. Trench warfare was a nightmare of mud, lice, poison and gas attacks, exploding artillery shells that uncovered buried bodies, and the constant threat of sudden and random death.³

The trench systems were protected by wire and machine guns. Each army in an almost suicidal manner would take turns charging across no man’s land to almost certain death. This insane behavior went on for most of the war. Every offensive gesture made by either side was crushed by the entrenched defense on the Western Front. The Western Front battle lines did not move ten miles in any direction during the campaign.

The technology that should have created a new type of quick and humane war produced a bloody stalemate between the forces. The harsh lessons that were not learned and the original lack of effectiveness of technology without the proper tactics during the early stages of the war caused a regression in the already obsolete tactics that were best captured by Fuller in 1961, an expert on the tactics of WWI in the following quotes: Tactics, in fact, reverted to their level under the Spartans in the 5th century B.C., with one difference, the generals never went into battle⁴ and The problem now became the reinstatement of mobility, and its solution depended on overcoming the defensive trinity of bullet, spade and wire.⁵

The above statements clarifies the savagery and regression caused by technology during World War I. When the war machine stopped, more than 8.52 million deaths were to be attributed to the gruesome and horrific war. World War I created the following paradox: Mankind did not step forward into the future, but ironically, stepped back into the past with the advancement of technology as a vehicle.

The Human Toll

This book draws upon a trans-national perspective, focusing primarily upon British, French and Canadian sources but complimenting these materials by resources from the late arrival of American and the abandonment of Russian war effort. The use of primary documents are balanced by employing as many memoirs, letters and diaries from the front as a way in locating the unified sentiments between these public and private reflections on war. Without exception, the multitude of sources used were created by eye-witnesses to the conflict. Though this in no way ensures that the creators were not being overly imaginative in their depictions or did not suffer from other external production pressures, but it is fairly certain that (especially in the case of narrative memoirs) their ideas are based upon wartime writings and are not wholesale fictions.⁶ Additionally, this book draws upon a number of theoretical concepts, but have done so with the intent of constructing subtle linkages between apparently disparate concerns rather than any aspiration to disregard the nuances of any one theoretical approach.

Finally, this book includes in this Author’s Note a brief discussion of contemporary historiography on the First World War, some of it addressing the dynamics of cultural memory of the war, but all generally interested in the post-war period. This discussion is incorporated not to distract from the issues, but rather to stress that such discussions do not occur in a vacuum. Only through acknowledging and challenging the cultural discourses encompassing an event can one hope to approach it with any semblance of phenomenological