An der Front und Hinter der Front - Au front et à l'arrière

Other than mutiny or the disintegration of an army under the pressure of enemy action, the most obvious sign of military collapse was desertion or mass surrender. Surrender could be distinctly risky given the propensity of soldiers to kill rather than take prisoners. Approximately 397 000 British soldiers were captured during the war, around 177 000 of them on the Western Front. While most of the latter were captured in March 1918, the highest proportion of British troops surrendering rather than fighting to the death actually occurred in 1914. As with casualties generally, the fluidity of mobile warfare was more likely to lead to men being cut off and under less supervision than more static warfare. Pre-war regulars and especially recalled reservists were also probably less well prepared for the intensity of conflict than more intelligent, better educated and better prepared wartime volunteers. The near collapse to apathetic surrender of the 1 stRoyal Warwicks and 2 ndRoyal Dublin Fusiliers at St Quentin on 27 August 1914 is well known.

Viewing the military experience in the Great War as a whole, it could be argued that, for those not actually maimed physically or mentally by the war, wartime service had neither an overtly positive nor negative impact. The post-war literature of disillusionment that appeared between 1928 and 1935 represented only a small fraction of the extensive British creative writing that emerged from the war, only one fifth of which was the work of combatants. The British army’s post-war recruitment was relatively buoyant, providing little evidence of any immediate revulsion against matters military. If wartime expansion had little impact on the army as an institution in the longer-term, and whatever the haphazard process by which expansion had occurred during the war itself, citizen soldiers imbued with civilian culture had proved equal to the challenge of conflict.

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