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| 1918 Lee Enfeld SMLE Rifle with bayonet Credit: http://www.deactivated-guns.co.uk/
Recently in Peterborough there was a small exhibit created in partnership with the Peterborough Museum and Fleming College's Museum Management program. The exhibit showcased a French Graz Great War bayonet.
Film of Canadians preforming Bayonet Drill, Shorncliffe, UK. |
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| Soldiers from the 2nd Contingent, 19th or 20th Battalion Practicing Bayonet Drill, CNE. Credit: Toronto Archives |
Recently, British Historian Paul Hodges finished his doctoral dissertation on the examination of World War I atrocities committed by British Soldiers. Before completing his thesis, he wrote a very interesting article on the British obsession with using the bayonet in the Great War. A past article has demonstrated that Peterborough soldiers were also fascinated with using the bayonet.
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| Canadian soldiers practicing bayonet drill, Toronto Armouries Credit: The Story of the Great War, Vol. V. |
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‘They don’t like it up ’em!’: Bayonet fetishization in the British Army during the First World War
Paul Hodges
Birkbeck, University of London
Abstract-
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| Canadians Fixing Bayonets Circa: 1916 |
The bayonet was widely fetishized in the British Army in the
First World War era, both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. A vibrant, rich and
quickly transmitted culture grew around this, which had real effects on the
battlefields of the war. Supreme confidence was placed in British masculinity,
a masculinity that depended on the effective and brutal use of this weapon.
Training frequently focused on it. Both this confidence and training focus were
misplaced, as in fact the bayonet was not a particularly useful or effective
weapon. The combination of this strong fetishization of the weapon and its
ineffectiveness had a tendency to encourage atrocity and prisoner killing, in
which some soldiers indulged keenly, as the main opponents on whom the bayonet
could be used successfully were those who were unarmed or wounded
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| British Advance with Fixed Bayonets, N.d. |
It is not often that comedy catchphrase pearls have grown
from a piece of grit of historic military culture, let alone one based on
wounds and wounding. However, Corporal Jones’s stock epithet, ‘They don’t like
it up ’em!’ from the popular sitcom Dad’s Army seems to have done so. The
character and his catchphrase had origins in the co-writer’s Jimmy Perry’s
experiences of the Second World War and roots even further back. Jones was
based on an elderly, experienced lance-corporal under whom Perry served when
aged 15in the 19th Hertfordshire Battalion, Local Defence Volunteers (the Home Guard’s
precursor), and his catchphrase came from an instructor in the Royal Artillery,
to which Perry was later called up (Webber et al. 2001: 7–8;Perry and Croft
2003: 15). But certainly the catchphrase would not have sounded out of place in
the British trenches of the First World War and would not have been laughed at.
Confidence in the British infantry’s prowess with the bayonet was high and,
indeed, compared with many contemporary soldiers’ texts, Corporal Jones’s love
of ‘cold steel’ is positively anaemic. Such texts are highly revealing,
displaying a self-supporting military culture, one that was uncompromising in
its attitude to opponents. British military training at the time of the First
World War laid strong emphasis on the usage of the bayonet. This standard piece
of infantry equipment was difficult to use in open combat other than against
prone opponents. Almost by definition, these prone opponents could have been considered
potential prisoners. Despite this and other practical inadequacies, the bayonet
retained its elements as a standard-bearer, a shibboleth and
the lust to kill is on us, we see
red. Into one trench, out of it, and into another. Oh! The bloody gorgeousness
of feeling your bayonet go into soft yielding flesh – they run, we after them,
no thrust one and parry, in goes the bayonet the handiest way. (Gammage 1974:
96–97)
Similarly, the reported sergeant-major’s training ground
cliché which went along the lines of ‘Fix bayonets! Don’t look down! You’d soon
find the hole if there was a fucking tart on it’ (Vansittart 1981: 33), also
carries a similar sexual charge.
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| Courcelette Sugar Refinery 15 September 1916 Credit: Canadian War Museum |
Unlike other weapons, the bayonet
was a universal part of all infantry-men’s equipment and concomitant with this
status there had been a long-established emphasis on bayonets in the training
of the infantry soldier of the British Army. The standard training manual
frequently described its importance alongside that of the rifle. These
assertions confidently began by stating that, ‘The rifle and bayonet, being the
most efficient offensive weapons of the soldier, are for assault, for repelling
attack or for obtaining superiority of fire. Every NCO and man in the platoon
must be proficient in their use’ (War Office 1917: 91). Individual and team
bayonet fighting were two of the five events making up the annual divisional
competition known as the Grand Assault at Arms, fiercely competed for by the
regular soldiers over the years.
The bayonet, however, represented
much more to the British Army of the First World War era than a ‘simple’ weapon
of assault. One of its major functions was (and continues to be) to inculcate
the correct attitude in troops. In training, the bayonet’s ability within the
Army’s teaching and practice regime to demonstrate the correct, aggressive
approach towards the enemy seems to have been the key reason for its frequent
and pivotal role in courses of instruction. It could also be argued that even
by the First World War, troop motivation had become the primary purpose of the
bayonet, as the stances and moves taught were applicable only to earlier
situations where the infantry formed tightly gathered close ranks. Technically,
the bayonets issued were not well designed and often were simply not strong enough
to carry out the actions that soldiers had been trained to perform with them. A
report by the British Small Arms School that investigated their efficiency in
1924 made this clear. Its expert authors testified that during the First World
War:
the utility of the bayonet as a
cutlass or dagger proved to be negligible, hence the demand for trench knives,
clubs, etc. it is one of the most futile instruments imaginable. Even for
cutting up duck boards and ammunition boxes for firewood it was ineffective, and
it generally suffered severely in the contest […]. As a killing shape it makes
a very nasty wound, but is of a bad section for penetration and worse for with drawal.
Owing to its great length and the leverage exerted it frequently breaks or
bends, even against straw-filled sacks and in spite of being kept properly
sharpened. (Anon. 1924)
Other criticism in the report
makes it clear that British lives were lost due to bayonets’ unwieldiness in a
fight, their propensity to glint or reflect at night and their deleterious
effect on shooting accuracy and ability, particularly snap and sharp shooting.
Moreover, the seventeen inches or so of bayonet affixed to a four-foot
Lee-Enfield rifle, with an overall combined length of 5 feet 3 inches, was
singularly unsuited to the narrow confines of most trenches. In such
circumstances it was exceedingly awkward to handle and often downright
dangerous, as the medical officer Captain J.C. Dunn described in his well-known
amalgamated journal of the Royal Welch Fusilier’s war. As well as the mud that
debilitated rifles, he reported in an entry for 27 October 1914 that ‘some of
our bayonets too were broken owing to the various uses to which they were put.
In those hastily dug trenches the fixed bayo-net was an encumbrance’ (Dunn
1938: 85). Moreover, the technical deficiencies of the bayonet as a combat
weapon forced soldiers to use it in a brutal manner, as mentioned by this
anonymous commanding officer recounting the planning of an attack on a
troublesome enemy position with some colleagues. Three of his companies
advancing in two waves were to
deliver a rapid assault, capture the enemy’s machine-gun emplacements at the
point of the bayonet, and drive any remaining Germans out of the wood. To those
present it appeared to be a clear case of neck or nothing, and so it was to
prove.(Officer 1918: 182)
The classic image of the First
World War infantryman eviscerating enemies with a bayonet to the chest or
stomach is therefore somewhat fictional. These
images, even before the irromanticization of a brutal form of combat is
considered, should be considered as largely false as they do not depict the
manner in which the bayonet was recommended to be used in the field. When
attacking the chest with a bayonet it risked bouncing off the ribcage without
inflicting the necessary debilitating injury, or else the bayo-net’s tip was
broken or shattered completely on a rib. Sticking the enemy’s belly risked
getting the bayonet stuck fast there, even with the quarter-twist to remove
that was practised in training, as the strong stomach muscles sealed and gripped
tight around the faces of the weapon. John Lucy’s platoon commander,
interestingly depicting the ‘blooding of bayonets’ as almost a passive act,
warned against this risk in his pep talk before the Battle of Mons on 22 August
1914. He told his platoon they were ‘bound to be successful but do not forget
that when blooding your bayonets, yes, rather, blooding your bayonets, do not
on any account bury them too deeply. Damn nuisance you know, endeavouring to
withdraw an unnecessarily deep bayonet’ (Lucy 1938: 99). Alarmingly soldiers
could discover how wise this advice was in the field, although it did not
necessarily reduce their verve and excitement at using the bayonet
successfully. One second lieutenant reported in a letter home dated 11 June
1915 that hi regiment did damned well, and our
men fought magnificently, especially when they could get in with the bayonet: I
myself had the extreme satisfaction of bayoneting three […] only in the
excitement of the moment I left it sticking in the third, and ran on with only
a revolver: anyhow it must have hurt him, when he pulled it out, if he was
still alive, and I hope it did. (Savory 1915)
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| German 'dummy' |
The neck, while presenting a much
smaller and more difficult target to strike, posed no blade retrieval problems
for the infantryman and very little risk of any weapon breakage. That it was a
more instantly deadly and gushingly bloody method played a part in the
popularity of this method. The advice to be found in training manuals to slash
at the groin is interesting and similarly telling; it seemed to have been an
allusion to the role of bayonet fighting in emasculating the enemy in the most
basic castrating manner. It was couched in rather coy terms though – a ‘Rio
blow’ to the ‘lower part’ for McLaglen (1916: 11) and a ‘lower stomach’ blow or
‘low left or right parry’ for the Officer (1915). By 1931 official advice was
not so coy, with the groin and neck the only ‘pointing’ targets mentioned in
standard drill (War Office 1931: 157).
Having faded in usage somewhat during the
Boer War, British observations of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 renewed
interest in the bayonet. Interest in the force of the mass, spirited but
attritional Japanese bayonet charges was reflected in the culture and language
of British First World War soldiers, with the phrase ‘And if Turkey makes a
stand / She’ll get Ghurka’d and Japann’d’ cropping up in the chorus of the song
‘When Belgium put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’ (Ellerton 1914: 50–52).Did British
interest in the Japanese method of massed bayonet charges result in atrocity
when contact with the enemy was made during the First World War? Euphemistic
hints in this direction were contained in contemporary bayonet training
manuals, such as when Captain McLaglen details advice on ‘delivering “point” to
the downed opponent’ (McLaglen 1916:12–13). ‘Downed’ indicates that the
opponent was probably disarmed or wounded but certainly little threat and thus
protected under proper application of military law. The British Manual of
Military Law was clear-cut on this (War Office 1914: 248).
Denis Winter goes as far as to
assert that ‘no man in the Great War was ever killed by a bayonet unless he had
his hands up first’ (Winter1978: 110). John Keegan opines, with particular
reference to the first day of the Somme, that ‘edged-weapon wounds would have
almost dis-appeared, for though the marks of bayonets were found on a number of
bodies, it was presumed that they had been inflicted after the victim was dead;
the best statistic available is that edged-weapon were a fraction of one per
cent of all wounds inflicted in the First World War’ (Keegan1976: 264).
Although this is a widely quoted piece of a hugely influential work, Keegan’s
source, or possibly sources, are obscure and both the rather vague statistic
and the notion of all bayonet wounds seen being post-mortem injuries can be
doubted. Reports of the full-scale desecration of bodies in this manner, while
not unheard of, were rare, although the checking of the status of bodies using
bayonets to prod might well be rather more commonly expected (an atrocity in
itself since this amounts to the killing of wounded soldiers). Both Winter and Keegan
do then overstep the mark; neither paints an accurate picture of bayonet usage
during the war. The disappearance of edged-weapon wounds was not the contemporary
impression. Indeed, the major medical manual of the war thought that wounds
caused by bayonets, knives and so on were on the increase. The manual’s author
stated that ‘cold steel’ was the cause of 5 per cent of soldiers’ wounds;
compared to well under 1 per cent in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, but less
than the 10 per cent rate sometimes reached during the 1912–13 Balkan wars
(Delorme 1915: 1–2).
There were certainly occasions
when bayonet wounds among the opposition could be very common, as reported by
Dunn after his battalion conducted a large raid on The Warren, south of
Festubert, on 5 July1916. It is possibly significant that the raid was in
retaliation for the deaths suffered by the regiment when a large German mine
created Red Dragon crater on 22 June. Dunn, a medical officer, states clearly
that ‘most of the wounds were from shell and bomb splinters, and occurred in A Company,
whereas bayonet-wounds were commonest among the German-prisoner wounded’ (Dunn
1938: 221). There were certainly many further actions that were widely and
authoritatively reported to have been carried out by use of the bayonet. It is
perfectly correct to suspect that the vast loss of life during the course of
the war due to bullet, shell and disease did massively outnumber these
small-scale, isolated bayonet-wound incidents. So Keegan’s overall fraction of
well under 1 percent of deaths caused by bayonets might be correct. However, it
is worth recognizing that the pattern of warfare was by no means even. At
different times, in different units, and in different places bayonet wounds
could even have been common.
The foundations of the
fetishization of the bayonet were built upon its role in supporting troops’
self-confidence. In part, this comfort was derived from the fact that the
bayonet could indeed sometimes be effectively used. In some circumstances, its
real power as a psychological weapon could melt enemy resistance with little
real fighting required. Thus the bayonet’s relatively rare but hugely
psychologically impressive role in a rout was central to its fetishization.
Similarly, an effective, successful bayonet charge could sometimes be far more
enticing a method of victory than other means of achieving it, such as
outflanking or prolonging trench warfare. On other occasions there was little
real offensive alternative to a bayonet charge (Griffith 1981: 70).
More comforting still was the
bayonet’s utility as a last line of defence or offence, as in this incident
proudly recorded in an official brigade war diary on 26 December 1914: ‘In the
wake of a British attack on December18–19, the Germans reported that most of
their wounds were caused by bayonets, because their opponents’ rifles were
jammed’ (20th Infantry Brigade 1914: 102). There was some truth in the conceit
that what ever the situation, whether it was wet, muddy weather, or the
non-appearance of ammunition and so on, you could rely on your trusty bayonet.
Such beliefs could haunt British soldiers, as described here by an officer who
was advancing with his troops to a vicious ongoing skirmish when he encountered
a few retreating, ragged survivors of the battle described as
shattered, nerveless men whose
human nature had been tried past endurance – now came surging back in twos and
threes. Especially memory recalls the drawn haggard face of an officer who was
making rather pathetic attempts to reform these twos and threes. He chattered
wildly, disconnectedly, yet with a method of sense like a drunken man; ‘The
bay’net!’ he kept repeating, ‘that’s the thing for them. Show them the bayonet,
get at them with the bayonet, and they’ll run…’ (Officer 1918: 178)
The major contribution that their
presumed prowess with the bayonet made to supporting British soldiers’
self-confidence was the thought that Germans greatly feared bayonets. ‘They
don’t like it up ’em!’, indeed! This comforted the troops, reassuring them of
their supremacy as soldiers and men. If popular, patriotic adventure stories
had helped form a myth of empire that was ‘the story England told itself as it
went to sleep at night’(Green 1980: 3), then the stories of easy slaughter and
terrified Germans, told in the press and between soldiers themselves, formed a
myth of the bayonet that helped soldiers as they went to sleep at night.
Immediately on the outbreak of war, The Times was keen to reassure its readers
that German infantrymen were jittery and eminently defeatable via the bayonet.
The third headline after ‘First French Battle’ on its main news page for Monday
10August 1914 was ‘Germans routed with the bayonet’, a report on French troops
occupying Altkirch ‘after a sharp action in which they drove the defending
German force before them with the bayonet’ (The Times 1914a: 6). Similarly,
four days later, the fourth main news headline after ‘French Frontier Success’
was ‘Village taken by bayonet charges’, reporting that Lagarde ‘was carried by
the French infantry in bayonet charges with great dash’ (The Times 1914b: 6).
When the war dispatches carried by the newspapers grew in depth and length, a
focus on the Germans’ inadequacies as men is noticeable.
The report of the
thoughts of a Lieutenant Deppe, in charge of a small group of Belgian troops who
had landed in Folkestone having escaped from Namur, before his enthusiastic
return to the front, is typical. He described the opponents as: very well organized but German soldiers were great cowards.
‘They are very much afraid of the bayonet, especially the French bayonet,’ he
said. ‘When they see a bayonet they turn and run. The Turcos say, “When we hit
one German with a bayonet five fall down” and that is perfectly true.’ (The
Times1914c: 7)
Undermining German masculinity seemed key to supporting
Allied masculinity. It was when the British forces got into action that the
press really went to town with their bayonet fetish. A report on ‘Tournai and
after’ on 29 August1914 produced this remarkable paragraph entitled ‘BAYONET
WORK’:
The German infantry fire here, as
elsewhere, appears to have been very bad though the artillery work was deadly.
At times the fighting was hand to hand and repeatedly our troops made excellent
use of the bayonet. ‘Man,’ said a stalwart Highlander, almost with glee, ‘ye
should hae seen them rin miles frae the wee bit of steel.’ (The Times1914d: 8)
Again, the reports attempted whenever possible to undermine
German masculinity and even in this article entitled ‘In the fighting line’,
their humanity. Germans were described as more like common swine than men when
facing bayonets. The author is apparently directly quoting a private in the
BlackWatch, who reported that ‘the Germans don’t like the bayonet. If you gone at
them with a bayonet they squeal like pigs. When you are taking them prisoners
they go down on their knees, evidently afraid of what is going to happen’ (The
Times1914e: 6). Animalistic, de-humanizing descriptions frequently extended to
the bayonet itself, most often in the form of ‘pig-sticker’, but in this case
as a harpoon. Sapper Edward Hughes, watching the 4thAustralian Division attack
on the Oosttaverne Line on 7 June 1916, thought
it was a magnificent, though
dreadful sight to witness […] To watch the Huns run out of their trenches
towards us – and to see the way the ‘Ossies’ harpooned them one after another,
it was a sight that I shall always recall. (Passingham
1998: 131)
Concomitant with its prominent position in popular military
psychology and imagination, rituals developed around the bayonet, particularly
prior to battle. Captain J.L. Jack described a typical ritualistic scene in his
diary on 12 September 1915. His divisional reserve troops had been made aware
of their participation in a forthcoming attack:
There is an immediate tuning up
for action, the sharpening of ‘swords’ – as bayonets are called by rifle
regiments – the practising of assaults, inspection of gas masks and special
equipment, and all the other horrid ritual for battle, from which all ranks may
draw their own conclusions … (Jack 1964: 110–11)
Such rituals can be observed in the official British films
of the war, as well as more mundane but tellingly prominent shots of troops
just fiddling about with bayonets. Shots of cheering Tommies waving their
bayonets with buoyant enthusiasm were frequent throughout British films and
newsreels of the war. The sheer presence of the bayonet seems to have inspired
excitement and confidence; and it is particularly striking in many primary
texts that over whelming belief was invested in the bayonet and the power of
‘coldsteel’. Lieutenant M.L. Walkinton provided a typical example. His
24thMachine Gun Company was in close support to the 2nd Battalion,
Northamptonshire Regiment in their advance towards Bellewaarde Lake on 31 July
1917. All the men were ‘very excited and elated. Bursting shells gave light to
see by and it was thrilling to see the Northampton bayonets flashing as the
troops advanced. Surely nothing could stop us’(Walkinton 1980: 131). Such
belief and over-confidence could prove fool-hardy and deadly, as a Scottish
territorial, Harold Stainton, reported from near Kemmel in December 1914. One
of his men witnessed a charge of the Gordons and
told me that a fine young
subaltern of theirs who led his men through the hedge carried a sword (already
a most unusual thing). Waving this ridiculous toy he rushed ahead shouting
‘Scotland for ever!’ only to be killed within twenty yards of our hedge. It was
an attack far more in common with the battles of the eighteenth-century than
the battles of eighteen months later on the Somme. Here was no slow steady
advance behind a creeping barrage of shellfire, but the wild rush so dear to
Highland tradition, with effective use of cold steel. Never, at any stage of
the war, did I see so many bayoneted corpses as I did when, a few days later,
we occupied that German trench.
(Stainton 1914: 23)
Trust in ‘cold steel’ as the ultimate effective
intimidation, hated by the enemy, continued right up to the highest levels, as
can be seen in Haig’s diary, as he described the recovery of some trenches lost
to the enemy in Ypres area on 23 October 1914: ‘The Germans resisted until the
very end and gave way only when machine guns were enfilading their trenches at
very close range, and when they were threatened by cold steel’ (Cooper1935:
195–96).With such high-level support it is unsurprising that bayonet training
had a high profile within the base camp training that troops received and in
the further training exercise undertaken behind the front lines, a waiting or
between actions. Notes taken by an officer preparing to provide infantry
training in 1915 indicate that bayonet training in the British bases was
undertaken daily and was rigorous. The notes envisaged much of the training
being done on a course, the highlight of which would be a specially constructed
lengthy zig-zagging trench, with at least nine dummies waiting to be
bayoneted, mainly on the corners (Seys-Philips 1915).
Such courses were not the limit of the bayonet in training
though; the field exercises of more advanced training would always end in a
bayonet charge also (Hall 1916: 28). An identical focus was maintained at the
main train-ing base in France, the daunting Étaples. Private Frank Bass
described atypical day there in a diary entry dated 17 September 1916, expressing
some surprise that there was no let-up at all for a Sunday. It was
apparently [the] same as any
other day. Reveille 5.30. Breakfast 6. Parade8.00 for ‘Bullring’ or No. 2
Training Camp. Bayonet fighting with the Royal Scots. 8 of us, including Adams,
Coulson and myself, went over final assault and went over all right, I think.
After this, rapid loading and firing and then bayonet fighting again. (Bass, 1916)
By 1916, bayonet training actually became more dominant in a
trainee soldier’s preparation for the trench war at home and abroad. Second
Lieutenant Harold Mellersh was puzzled to discover this, and contrasted it with
the training he had undergone just over a year earlier. He returned to his base
camp in Plymouth in October 1916 upon recovery from an injury and found that
there was surprisingly little for him to do, as the
training of recruits was now even
not much in the hands of the ordinary sergeants, let alone the officers: the
accent had shifted to bayonet drill, with rows of stuffed dummies strung up on
wires and experts, specially trained in simulating and stimulating ferocity, in
charge. ‘In! Out! Jab!’ I don’t think we won the war at all by ferocity, or
that the attempted inculcation of it suited the British temperament. (Mellersh 1971:
105)
Mellersh’s doubts over the pertinence and suitability to
British troops of such prolonged and inflamed bayonet training were rare among
officers or NCOs of the time. In his analysis of fears of brutalization, Jon
Lawrence(2003: 577–89) makes it clear that, aside from isolated radicals and
pacifists, such as Norman Angell, fears concerning troops’ brutalization did
not form a major issue during the war but only exploded post-war. Officers at
the front responsible for arranging training for the troops under them during
periods away from the front line often relied on bayonet training, again mainly
for its attitudinal benefits. The typical attitude of those in authority is
expressed here by an officer in charge of a company, fresh from the heat of hard
battle on the Somme in July 1915, who approved of the fact that activity was
maintained whilst troops were nominally ‘resting’ near the Bois de Dames. He
was glad to ‘use the time hereto renew clothing equipment etc. and to repeat
musketry, close order drill bayonet fighting etc.’ (Gore-Browne 1915: 6–7).But
it was not only officers who were keen on bayonet training. Private John
Jackson, returning to training after an injury in 1916, recalled that there
was much practice in bombing, and
bayonet fighting and we put in some hard and tiring work. But if it was hard
training it was also interesting and we had great fun among the dummy figures,
representing ‘Jerries’ in trenches, on our training ground. As a result of
constant practice we became very proficient in the use of the rifle and fixed
bayonet, but as a degree of proficiency in the art of using a bayonet might one
day mean the difference between life and death for each of us, it was to our
advantage to know all the tricks. (Jackson 2005: 85–86)
The support ‘from below’ that could exist for their
officers’ views of bayone ttraining is therefore clear in this private’s words.
It was not only in prior training and periods of spare time on the front that
bayonet training was utilized as a handy filler. Significantly it was also used
more extensively during the important periods leading up to large battles as
the most adroit preparation. Major Jack on 15 July 1917 described his men
getting strident advice during their battle training prior to the Third Battle
of Ypres (Passchendaele):
The day before yesterday a
bloodthirsty fellow, Colonel Campbell, the Army bayonet-fighting expert, gave a
lurid lecture to a large, thrilled audience on the most economical use of the
bayonet, and to arouse the pugnacity of the men. He pointed out that to plunge
the blade right through an opponent is a waste of trouble, and that three
inches in the heart are quite sufficient. The cold-blooded science of the
business seems to me rather horrid, even if necessary. (Jack 1964: 227)
The ubiquitous Colonel Campbell could well have been one of
the most influential British soldiers of the war (Gray 1978: 26). His memorable
lectures were very well attended throughout the war. Lectures of the type that
Campbell delivered so forcefully could have a direct effect on the battlefield.
An exact mirror of the three-inch advice is contained in one private’s uncompromising
letter home dated 14 September 1918. He promised:
I shan’t take many prisoners when
it comes to going in the thick of it, a rifle and bayonet with three inches at
each Bosh I come in contact with at close quarters. The more we send to Heaven,
the sooner the war will be ended. (Spelman 1918)
Campbell’s advice to use short stabs was also memorably
reported by Siegfried Sassoon: ‘“The bullet and the bayonet are brother and
sister.” “If you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you.” “Stick him between the eyes,
in the throat, in the chest.” “Don’t waste good steel. Six inches are
enough”’(Sassoon 1930: 6).The effectiveness of such training at home and abroad
for actual warfare is debatable, as truly practical training for using a
bayonet is far harder than for other weapons of war. Throwing a grenade into a
dummy trench or aiming a rifle at a target are not so different activities from
the real tasks at hand in actual battle. Bags of straw – the usual target for
bayonet practice – are very different from animate humans. It is interesting to
note that bayonet training seems to have only relatively rarely taken the form
of fighting one another with wooden replicas affixed or such like, as had
previously been the case with sword fighting.
Training for using
the bayonet instead seemed to be singularly unrealistic. The artificial and
unhelpful pike-influenced drill stances that had been practised and drilled
during training were swiftly abandoned on the battlefield, as suggested by
Lance Corporal Francis’s description quoted above, of bayonet action as being
with ‘no thrust one and parry, in goes the bayonet the handiest way’ (Gammage
1974: 96–97). However, bayonet training remained popular both at home and at
the front and one of the major reasons for its popularity, both with the men
and officers, was its aggressive content. The aggressive nature and content of
bayonet training was often emphasized. This even comes across in the official
training textbooks; one later edition stated plainly and tellingly that
‘bayonet fighting produces lust for blood’ (War Office 1917:97). The simple act
of wielding a bayonet was popularly imagined to have an immediate and powerful
brutalizing effect on men. It was no accident that the limited time allowed to
complete the bayonet assault course was popularly known in soldiers’ slang as
the ‘mad minute’. The extreme nature of the training, based as it was on such texts
and the enthusiasm of trainers, is often vividly described in anecdotes.
Sassoon again turned to an anonymous trainer clearly based on Colonel Campbell:
The star turn in the schoolroom
was a massive sandy-haired Highland Major whose subject was ‘The Spirit of the
Bayonet’. […] He spoke with homicidal eloquence, keeping the game alive with
genial and well-judged jokes. He had a Sergeant to assist him. The Sergeant, a
tall sinewy machine, had been trained to such a pitch of frightfulness that at
a moment’s warning he could divest himself of all semblance of humanity. With
rifle and bayonet he illustrated the Major’s ferocious aphorisms, including
facial expression. When told to ‘put on the killing face’, he did so, combining
it with an ultra-vindictive attitude. ‘To instil fear into the opponent’ was
one of the Major’s main maxims. Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the
life out of Germans.(Sassoon 1930: 14–15)
The titling of such lectures with the phrase ‘The Spirit of
the Bayonet’, and the frequent references to this, are interesting. Although
the phrase was no doubt often used unthinkingly as a mere stock epithet, the
logic behind it, conscious or unconscious, was to imbue the physical object
with an emotional life of its own. The bayonet itself was thought of as
aggressive, vicious, bloodthirsty and murderous, rather than the man wielding
it. Indeed, once the bayonet was in use, soldiers’ descriptions and
recollections display a tendency to erase the agency of the combatant: it is
as if the bayonet’s owner appeared to have no choice but to go along with its
spirit. This has the effect of placing a comfortable distance between the man
and the act of killing. For example, when Private John Jackson of the Cameron
Highlanders recalled his first major battle experience at the Battle of Loos he
admitted that the Germans
fought hard, but could not stand
against our determination, and our terrible bayonets […] Machine-gunners
slaying us from their hidden posts, threw up their hands crying ‘Kamerad’, when
we got within striking distance, but these deserved and received no quarter.
Cold steel and bombs did their duty then, and the village was strewn with dead
and running with blood. (Jackson 2005: 54)
Here the step away from causing death, provided by the
bayonets being described as ‘terrible’ rather than the soldiers wielding them,
and both cold steel and bombs as doing ‘their duty’ rather than the men
themselves ,is clear. The psychology, often running along such lines, that
underpinned the strenuous training in the bayonet was understood by men in the
field of combat. In a section of memoir covering the summer of 1917, an
infantry captain, Stormont Gibbs, mused on the hatred and conquering of fear needed
to turn a man into an effective killer. Gibbs noted that
In any sort of hand fighting
there are the savage emotions that motivate the shot or thrust. The great
horror of war is this prostitution of civilized man. He has to fight for his
country and to do so has in actual practice to be brutalized for his country; he
has to learn to hate with the primitive blood lust of the savage if he is to
push a bayonet into another human being (who probably no more wants to fight
than he does). Need he hate? In the case of the average man he must as the
counter-balance to fear. (Gibbs 1986: 132)
Care must be taken not to react too strongly to ghoulish
sentiments about the bloody physicality of the bayonet. As the above quotation
indicates, this was a concern for some troops contemporarily also, but one that
was subsumed by the necessity not to be frightened. Frightened soldiers could
not have fought with a bayonet effectively. Confidence was a vital requirement;
the bayonet was useless as an effective psychological weapon with-out it. Only
a confident bayonet charge could effect a rout. Bayonet training was thus by no
means unnecessary – or at least it would not have been had the level of bayonet
fighting that was expected been achieved and if the standard-issue British
bayonet had been more capable of achieving the tasks expected of it. It is also
worth remembering in this context that bayonet fighting fell into the category
of combat exchanges that soldiers generally found psychologically untroubling.
It was not ‘senseless’, unlike shell deaths which soldiers frequently found very
disturbing. Many soldiers summed up the sense of bayonet fighting neatly as
‘him or me’ and such an equation disturbed them little.
Despite these contexts, the effect of the aggression and
hatred included and inculcated during training on the men who underwent it
could however remain startling, approaching a ‘primitive blood lust’. William
Johnson, a private in the 22nd London (‘Queen’s’) Regiment, described the
immediate preparations for an attack on 7 November 1917:‘“Fix bayonets!” yells
the colonel. And the shining things leap from the scabbards and flash in the
light as they click on the standards. They seem alive and joyous; they turn us
into fiends, thirsty for slaughter’ (Johnson1930: 323).
This conception of men undergoing a transformation by wielding
bayonets was frequently referred to in soldiers’ texts. Patrick MacGill
described the transformation wrought on his comrades by heavy hand-to-hand
action on the first day of the Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915. He found it
interesting to see how the events
of the morning had changed the nature of the boys. Mild-mannered youths who had
spent their working hours of civil life in scratching with inky pens on white
paper, and their hours of relaxation in cutting capers on roller skates and
helping dainty maidens to teas and ices, became possessed of mad Berserker rage
and ungovernable fury. Now that their work was war the bloodstained bayonet
gave them play in which they seemed to glory. ‘Here’s one that I’ve just done
in,’ I heard M’Crone shout, looking approvingly at a dead German. ‘That’s five
of the bloody swine now.’(MacGill 1916: 84)
M’Crone is portrayed as the most transformed. MacGill had
‘never heard him swear before, but at Loos his language would make a navvy in a
Saturday taproom green with envy’. Previously of religious turn of mind‘now,
inflicting pain on others, he was a fiend personified […]’ (MacGill1916:
84–85).
But the aggressive training in the bayonet appears to have
had even more grave consequences; that of facilitating atrocity and war crimes.
Primary sources suggest that closing in on the enemy with bayonets encouraged
the murderous killing of prisoners or potential prisoners. Wielding a bayonet seemed
to reduce soldiers’ faculty to grant mercy. H.E. May, a sergeant in the
Highlanders, portrayed a bayonet assault in a way that was typical of these
sorts of depictions. He described a generic attack, although it seems to have
been in the context of experience he had on the Ypres salient in late 1917:
You see a line of stumpy
tree-trunks that, dimly, you realize is the objective. You creep up. A wild
melee; stabbing with a bayonet. A gushing of blood from many wounds (oh! the
nauseating smell of freshly spilled human blood in quantity), and then a cry of
‘Kamerad!’ and a whine for mercy. Unheeded, for all the enemy died.(May 1930:
200)
At times, the fetishization of the bayonet directly affected
the mood and conduct of soldiers on the battlefield. T.H. Gore-Browne was
stationed in trenches in front of Rue de Tillelay, Laventie, and wrote of the expectations
of some troops newly arrived at the front in August 1915. He had command of ‘a squadron of North Irish Horse […]. They are
awfully sick at the class of warfare we are waging at present. I haven’t a
notion of what they expected – a sort of orgy of shooting and stabbing I
suppose […]’ (Gore-Browne 1915).
What do such expectations of an ‘orgy of stabbing’ in fresh
troops reveal? They reveal strong tendencies for bayonet fetishization within
the British infantry in the First World War, as has been suggested throughout this
article. Moreover, such tendencies appear to have been transmitted to new
troops potently and quickly, and possibly in an increased manner. A spiral of
violence is not hard to conceive from this source.
To conclude, the fetishization of the bayonet often appeared
to have been the direct result of the excesses involved in infantry training at
thetime. The strong fetishization that had built up in the Army around
thiscomplicated and revealing weapon had the potential for deleterious
effects on the battlefield, tending to veer towards and facilitate atrocity.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper given at the GWACS Body at
War Conference in June 2004. I am grateful for useful comments from attendees
and other read-ers, particularly Joanna Bourke, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gregory
and Jessica Meyer.
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Suggested citation
Hodges, P. (2008), ‘‘They don’t like it up
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Journal of War and Culture Studies 1: 2, pp.123–138
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