Philip Gibbs was a British war time correspondent during the First World War and an incredibly prolific writer. Unfortunately, most of his reporting during the war were heavily filtered. The British government had all the reasons in the world to censor the dread and horror occuring on the front lines. They need just about every man they can get to enlist. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ultimately introduced military conscription in January 1916.
To go off on a tangent, before the compulsory enlistment, all sorts of strategies were used to get every abled man to join the army. They started with the typical message of duty to your Country, patriotism, etc. The famous poster of Lord Horatio Kitchener comes to mind. After a while, A more devious strategy was employed where they hire young women to walk around town and hand out white feathers, a symbol of cowardice, to publically shame people into enlisting.
In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had about 200,000 soldiers. Germany had about 2 million. It was so small compared to the massive land power that is Germany, that when Otto Von Bismark was asked what he would do if British Troops landed in Germany, he simply stated “I shall have them arrested”.
Several years after the war, Gibbs wrote his book “Now It Can Be Told”. The title implies that he could not write this book during war time because of censorship. Now that the war is over, he certainly did not hold back.
I read the book a couple months back. It is available free on the internet by the way. You can read it here. The writing is so beautiful. Every word seems to fall into place, one after another. How I wish I could write like that…
One of my favorite passage is about how despite the hellish condition faced on soldiers on the front line, human adaptability shines through. In the face of death, laughter and humor became a coping mechanism for many soldiers. Quote:
It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.
It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.
Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.