The First World War

by John Keegan

The Germans may have suffered worse – statistical disputes make the argument profitless – but, while the British had given of their all, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had another army in Russia with which to begin the war in the west all over again. Britain had no other army. Like France, though it had adopted conscription later and as an exigency of war, not as a principle of national policy, it had by the end of 1917 enlisted every man that could be spared from farm and factory and had begun to compel into the ranks recruits whom the New Armies in the heyday of volunteering of 1914–15 would have rejected on sight: the hollow-chested, the round-shouldered, the stunted, the myopic, the over-age. Their physical deficiencies were evidence of Britain’s desperation for soldiers and Haig’s profligacy with men. On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.