Tag: War Page 4 of 8

By Gregory Clark, December 11, 1943.

By Airmail Courier to The Star Weekly from the Isle of Capri.

The greatest advantage of being a war correspondent is that in the midst of battle, when all the world holds its breath, you can send a cable home every day that lets your family know you are whole and safe. True these cables are disguised as news dispatches. But any war correspondent’s family can tell you that the coldest dispatch is a love letter in thin disguise.

This, however, is frankly a love letter because I am writing it in the fabulous Isle of Capri. I came across to Naples for a visit of two or three days to a city I know well, having visited it at the time of the Pope’s coronation in 1939, and in 1940, when I made a cautious retreat from poor bedevilled France and its Maginot line, I came out via Italy and had another meal at the famous restaurant in Naples called Zia Theresa. Now I wanted to see what imperial dreams had done to Naples.

And just across the bay I saw Capri. So I am here in surely the loveliest three square miles on earth (saving only perhaps Go Home Bay on Georgian Bay, Ont.) where not one bomb, not one shell, not one pistol shot has disturbed the incredible peace and beauty of this place. This place from the dreamy terraces of which the dreamy inhabitants have watched the war go by, the ships sunk, the swift, flaming sea battles, and last, the terrible pounding of Naples, across the bay.

But here I have a chance to write about war correspondenting with some reflection. No doubt a number of things about our war news has puzzled and confused you these past three months. And if you know how we work, it may relieve your mind with regard to the shortcomings.

If I were a German general I don’t know which of two things I would most like to know; the number and equipment of the enemy or their immediate plans. Both those secrets can be given away by war correspondents. In the most innocent fashion war correspondents can not merely ruin our own plans, but they can place a good many thousand lives in jeopardy, So a thing called “security” comes into play. What we write is rushed at all speed, by dispatch rider, by jeep, by airplane, to the nearest cable head or wireless station.

There sit a body of field censors, specially trained officers, working for nothing but security. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about us They care only about those tens and hundreds of thousands of lives. And for the plans of our generals. We see the battles. We know both the things the German generals would give their lives, almost, to know: our strength and equipment and also our plans. But we have to write our dispatches, to the best of our ability, revealing nothing of these things.

The censors, back there at the first cable or wireless head, make perfectly sure that the best of our ability is better than best. Some of my dispatches from, say, the battle for Potenza, took six days to get to The Star. Part of that was due to the dispatch riders’ bikes breaking down, the indomitable jeeps bogging in the ruined roads, and partly because the censors simply held the dispatches on the shelf for a couple of days until it was no longer news to the enemy. We correspondents are content. We hope you are.

The life of a war correspondent in this war is both better and worse than that of a soldier. It is better in that he can pretty well come and go as he likes. But it is worse in that a soldier is in the line for a few days or even hours at a time and then is relieved by fresh troops. The poor war correspondent has to see all he can of all battles and all actions, with the result that the great majority of them are in close contact with operations to a far greater extent than the majority of soldiers.

The army does not want a lot of footloose newspapermen wandering about the battle area. So there is set up in all armies what is called the public relations section, which is a small military department of the war office. Officers representing this department are attached to all lesser formations such as army, corps and division. And they take complete control of the correspondents.

We typewriter commandos are virtually sworn in. We have to sign documents placing ourselves under control of the army. We wear regulation officers’ uniform with shoulder badges “Canadian War Correspondent” on our tunics instead of rank badges. We are permitted a little more baggage than officers to allow for our typewriters, paper and other stationery supplies, but we have to be prepared to live, move and have our being as soldiers in the fullest sense of the word.

The major in charge of our detachment has a staff of junior officers, lieutenants and captains, called conducting officers whose duty is to shepherd us wherever we go. One conducting officer to two correspondents is the rule, and with a driver, the four of us move in a jeep wherever we wish. Our detachment is a compact little squad with a lorry and one lighter vehicle to transport our baggage and kits as we travel along in jeeps with the divisional headquarters and work out from there each day in our jeeps.

Whenever the officer commanding us can organize it, he finds a house in a town or village and sometimes we have such a house to come home to at night for a week or ten days on end. It is usually an abandoned house and in a war-stricken area without light, power or water. We set up our safari camp beds on the floor of the bare and often scruffy rooms, saving one good room for a workroom. The cooks of our section do wonders at preparing meals for us from army rations to which we are entitled, eked out by other food bought with our mess fees which we pay out of our own pockets. Early in the morning, we leave by jeep, with our conducting officers, for divisional headquarters where we are “briefed” by the divisional intelligence officer who tells us what the situation is up front, what has happened overnight and what is likely to happen today. We then choose where we wish to go, forward; and two by two with our conductor, we head for the particular sector in which we are interested.

We have our cans of rations, our tea pail, and are prepared to spend the day. We report in at brigade headquarters en route; then call at battalion headquarters to get permission to go ahead of that point. And if we wish to get right into the middle of the picture, we report to company headquarters which normally is far enough ahead for anybody.

But when action is lively, and the division is moving fast, there is no house to come home to at night to write. We camp in the open with the army. We leave in the morning not knowing where divisional headquarters will be the next time we see it. At such times, we often stay with the regiments for days on end, camping with them in open fields, in ruined houses or villages and not infrequently in slit trenches right with the platoons. We never go back to divisional headquarters where our section with its lorry, and cooks and little domestic outfit awaits us; but we do our writing behind walls or in candle-lit cellars, and send the stories back by our jeep driver to our senior officer at division, who forwards them on by whatever means available to cable head.

During the battle for Potenza I had the most memorable experience of my Italian journey when I stayed for eight days right with one outfit in a furious chase of over 60 miles in the closest contact with the retreating Germans. I carried my typewriter slung on my back and wrote whenever a rest presented itself.

All units, all branches look on us as part of the army setup and allow us into all order groups, briefings and roundups. At present there are 12 Canadian war correspondents with the division, not counting the official war photographers who are also part of our little family. Canadian Press, the news agency which gathers the news for all Canadian newspapers collectively, and C.B.C. which serves in the same capacity for the national network, have the largest representation among us; the rest of us being correspondents for independent newspapers.

As for the element of risk in our lives, modern war, with its planes, bombs, paratroops, risky manoeuvres, long-range cannon, furious traffic, offers risks to all mankind, soldier and civilian, man, woman and child, without any element of proportion. Fifty miles from the front, I had a bomb drop on the other side of a house, kill all the Italians in the house and leave me just a little dusty and dazed; whereas 12 hours later I was crawling around in the dark within sound of the coughs of Germans with no risk whatever either to the Germans or me.

One afternoon Bill Stewart of Canadian Press and I spent several hours in a spooky dead village watching through slits and cracks in walls and around the corners of window sills while a famous regiment passed through. German mortar shells crashed about and shellfire sizzled overhead, but we were safe as in church in heavy walled houses and deep narrow streets of stone. There was no sense of risk anywhere, any more than there would be in crossing the street, for in that whole village all that afternoon though 200 soldiers went about their affairs there, not a soul was injured.

Yet on the way home at dark back to our village six miles away where our sweating typewriters champed at their bits, we had to cross a diversion around a blasted bridge. The Germans were shelling this diversion, knowing full well that in the dark our traffic would be bunched up there.

When our turn came to cross the rocky, muddy new road around the bridge, we, like the rest, timed our journey very nicely. We waited until one of the big shells fired from 10 miles away, whistled in and burst around the bridge. Then we started our race across in our jeep. We had plenty of time before the next shell was to follow. But we failed to count on the fact that the Germans had two of those big guns, one of which had not yet started to fire; and which did fire its first just as we were passing the massive abutment of the wrecked stone bridge.

The shell hit the far side of the abutment, a few feet from us, showering us with debris and mud and scaring the stuffing out of us. Those are the chances everybody takes in this war, whether in uniform or out of it, regardless of time, place or anything else. You don’t even have to leave Canada to encounter a share, however small, of this worldwide risk.

Editor’s Note: Greg mentions Go Home Bay as one of the loveliest places on earth. This is where his family had a cottage.

By Gregory Clark, August 3, 1940.

To understand the procedure of the German tank-dive bomber attack which brought disaster to the Allied armies in Flanders, we have to quit thinking of tanks as iron cavalry. We must think of them as land navy.

It is very much in our interests that we understand what happened in Flanders. The following details of that tank-dive bomber attack I got not only in the retreat itself from Brussels to the Channel, but on a return visit to France, via Brest, in which I talked, in all, to hundreds of officers and men, both British and French, who had survived these attacks and whose account of them tallied in general, so that I can outline the main type of attack. When you have read how simple and methodical the whole job was, the question in your mind will be – was there nobody in either the French or British armies who could have thought up a counter measure to deal with this type of attack?

The answer to that is that you cannot reorganize an army in a few days. The higher the efficiency of an army, the harder it is to change the system with which it is ingrained. The terrific speed with which the Germans pushed their attack was, you may be sure, to prevent that very thing – the discovery and organization of an adequate counter measure to the tank-dive bomber attack.

Just what we expected of German tanks I can’t say. This is, in the main, what they did.

A tank unit consisted of one big tank and two small tanks. A land battleship and two destroyers. The big tank was in wireless telephone communication with, as a rule, three Junker Stuka dive bombers. These planes waited, during an attack, either on the ground or possibly in the air.

The tank unit was given a piece of ground advance over. Its job was to seek out the resistance on that piece of ground. Not to try and get through by evading resistance, but to hunt the ground until it found the resistance, and then attack it.

Let us picture typical Flanders position, at the height of the battle. The Germans had broken through and were fanning out. Most positions therefore were not old-established trench or other defences, but new positions taken up to guard flanks, or new positions taken up in rear.

A battalion commander has a certain width of country to hold. Either a highway or one or more of the dirt roads that lace Flanders

A battalion commander has a certain width of country to hold. Either a highway or one or more of the dirt roads that lace Flanders everywhere, runs through his territory. He puts a company across the road, to build a barricade of elm trunks, farm wagons, rails, rocks, anything. They dig trenches for their machine-guns and anti-tank rifles. They fortify all the commanding ground. On their flanks, other companies, other battalions do likewise. Behind them, their support companies dig in and prepare positions of resistance. The air force reports that tanks are advancing.

Out of the dawn, instead of a long line of iron cavalry, come these tank units of three. Let us watch just one tank unit, as it comes cautiously up this road on which a point of resistance has been established. It is not Interested in its flanks. Not interested in any of its own infantry or motorcycle machine-gunners following an hour behind. It is interested only in locating the resistance in this piece of territory it has been assigned.

The System of Attack

Ahead of the tanks walk or cycle a few tank scouts. They are perhaps 300 yards ahead of the tanks. As they appear, the Allied garrison in the point of resistance open fire on them.

Instantly the scouts signal and the tanks halt. If necessary, they back up. They may even keep in constant slow motion, weaving this way or that or going to hide in a clump of bushes or behind a house. For it is when the tanks stop that the trouble begins.

The two small tanks immediately set out, one to the right, the other to the left, to feel along for the flanks or edges of the point of resistance. Out of the big tank emerges two mortar crews, each equipped with a five-inch mortar of the Stokes type. It fires a shell which blows a hole to bigger than a wash tub, but with a detonation that is terrific. It one of those noisy, demoralization bombs which the Germans put such faith in.

Now in the garrison of the point of resistance, all is tense. They know the tanks have arrived. Almost at once the mortar shells are falling at random all over their position. And from the flanks comes the sound of machine-gun and anti-tank rifle fire at the two smaller tanks furtively creeping along to feel and find the flanks of the position.

In the big tank, an officer is talking on the wireless telephone to his Junker dive bombers. He details his position to them. According to many of the soldiers I talked to, and especially case of a brigadier of a famous Scottish division, it was within five to 30 minutes that bombers arrived.

Bombing from the air is, of course, a new and incalculable item of modern war. The average soldier thinks of bombers as being impersonal. It comes with a very nasty shock to discover that three Junkers suddenly circling overhead are not casual wanderers of the sky, looking for what they may devour, but actually three bombers seeking for their target this particular position.

There overhead, the Junkers circle, amidst the hail of machine-gun fire which the position puts up, while they study the location of the three tanks, the big one and the two small ones defining the flanks of the position. Usually the tanks set out colored ground flares to show the bombers their location.

Then the bombers dive. They carried the same type of high intensity bomb as the mortars were throwing. Bombs of terrific blast but of no great destructive power. Follow my leader, the three Junkers dive, releasing only a couple of bombs at a time, but indiscriminately blasting the position as defined by the three tanks. This air attack lasted only a few minutes in most instances, but it put into effect exactly what all infantry are trained to do – take cover from air attack, all except, perhaps, the machine-gunners firing at the planes, and the minimum crews required on anti-tank rifles, mortars and so forth.

In the ideal attack, the effect of the dive bombing was to drive the majority of the garrison under cover. As the dive bombers finished their job, though still circling and diving furiously, there suddenly appeared in front the big tank in full charge, and at the same time, the two flank tanks came rolling in from the sides or even from the rear. The big tank destroyed the barricades, drove over the trench and strong points, dealt as rapidly as it could with all the resistance that was still organized after the bombing.

Not all these attacks were ideal. Sometimes the garrison put one or more of the tanks out of action, sometimes valiant machine-gunners got the Junkers as they dived. But so methodical and so completely unnerving and unique were these attacks that, as events show, the great majority of them succeeded to this extent – that resistance in this point was either driven to ground, forced to withdraw or scattered. Without a moment’s delay, in these cases, the tank unit went through, went on to seek further points of resistance.

The psychological power of this attack was profound. Troops from time immemorial have held the opinion that when the enemy has gone through, that is defeat. When the garrison of the point of resistance did emerge and assemble itself, they did so in the knowledge that the enemy had broken through and gone on. And that enemy infantry was soon following.

It was a very terrible position. If they stood fast and remanned the position, to meet the following infantry, the tanks could easily be recalled to take them in rear. If they moved to new positions they were caught in the act, as a rule, by the advanced units of motorcycle machine-gunners working from every hill and copse.

The natural instinct of junior commanders and in some cases higher commanders was to retreat, before the oncoming infantry could arrive, and try to get ahead of the tanks, to interpose themselves again, in fresh lines of resistance, between the tanks and the rear positions. This is, of course, precisely what the tank-dive bomber strategy hoped for. To remove these garrisons and make easy the advance of their following infantry. And nothing suited the plan better than the endless taking up of new and hasty points of resistance. In other words, set them up for the tank-Junker units to knock down.

Come From Behind, Too

After the evacuation from Dunkirk, one of the highest officers in the British army said to a specially assembled group of war correspondents who wanted to know what happened:

“You cannot fight armor without armor.”

In other words, if we had had as many armored divisions and big tanks as the Germans we could have gone tank hunting and a land naval battle would have ensued in which land battleships would seek each other all over the country, leaving the infantry and artillery to battle it out in their own terms.

As it was, the tanks broke through in this methodical, terrific, noisy. cautious and cooperative fashion, and once the tank units had done their job of seeking and shifting resistance, where the holes were made, the fast tanks went through and penetrated deep and got in behind and wrecked organization in plain guerrilla style, in rear areas where no organization had been set up to deal with them. And whenever it was set up, the same old tank-Junker set-up was promptly employed.

Here are a few of the comments of those who experienced the direct tank-dive bomber attacks.

A colonel of infantry: “In my case, I witnessed one of these attacks from a distance. And when my turn came, I had my battalion so arranged and so forewarned that we successfully beat off two separate attacks by two units, one after the other, complete with Junkers. The next thing I knew they were coming from behind. A unit that had broken through to the east of us simply turned and came along and caught us in the rear. My losses were extremely light, in view of three attacks, but since we were surrounded and apparently to be subjected to consecutive attacks until we were all wiped out, orders came for me to withdraw.”

A sergeant: “We were prepared to fight tanks. But the tanks stayed just out of sight and whistled up the dive bombers, who came and blasted us. There were six planes, not three, in our case. They roared around us for nearly an hour. Besides the mortar shells, they had field guns firing at us, too. Then from three sides came tanks, all firing rockets that stopped the artillery and sent the Junkers away, and shooting with cannons and machine-guns and weaving this way and that. What we ought to do is arm infantry with naval guns. Fifteen inchers.”

A chaplain: “I went through three of these assaults and saw several others from a distance They did not attack on a solid front. They merely punched holes. And where they punched a hole, other tank units came through and went right and left along the rear, attacking from behind.”

An artillery lieutenant: “I had two field guns. At first we were given conventional targets, firing on tanks advancing on roads. But once they broke through, they came from all angles. We did a great deal of open-sight shooting at tanks. One of my guns got three, a big one and two small ones. The other got two of the medium ones. We were constantly attacked by dive bombers. Sometimes we supported infantry in their positions. But later we just travelled the country, hunting tanks. Finally, we were going up a road when we came smack into six tanks in the fields on either side. We tried to run the gauntlet with our two dragons and their bouncing guns, but we were both in the ditch in less than 100 yards, under the concentrated machine-gun and light cannon fire of the tanks. Only six of us got away from that shemozzle. We learned later that we had blundered into a tank rendezvous where they were awaiting supplies of fuel. That is the way they were, in little flotillas all over the place, methodically going about their business.”

Editor’s Notes: The Stokes mortar was the British army’s standard mortar during World War 1. Greg was likely using it as a generic name for a type of mortar. The British replacement was the ML 3-inch mortar.

The term “Blitzkrieg” was not used in this early war article, but it was what he was describing. It was never a described German military tactic, but Greg got the general idea right, where there was constant communication between forces to move quickly. The overall tactics are much more complex, as can be read in the Wikipedia article.

By Gregory Clark, June 9, 1928.

What is a coward?

Where does cowardice begin or end?

These questions have recently been debated in the British House of Commons in connection with the matter of abolishing the death penalty for cowardice in time of war.

And some of the most interesting thoughts on cowardice that have ever been produced were advanced during this debate.

Are cowards born or made?

Isn’t a man who is cowardly born that way, with all the other miserable ingredients in him, part of him and his heritage, like the color of his hair and eyes, his size, his way of walking, or his ability to sing?

And if a man was made that way by God, why shoot him? Can the death penalty prevent cowards from enlisting?

Lord Hugh Cecil, speaking from the point of view of the born aristocrat, made the best plea for the death penalty.

“If,” said the noble lord, “you shoot a soldier for cowardice, that makes the whole army think that it is a shocking thing. The penalty of death has quite the unique quality of setting up a particular offence, and making people think that that is a thing which no one should do not mainly from the fear of the actual penalty but because It sets a stigma upon the offence which nothing else can do.”

Mr. Dutt Cooper, M.P., financial secretary to the War Office, if not an aristocrat himself, at least married to one, supported Lord Hugh Cecil’s view ingeniously:

“During the war,” said he, “at one time it was made a crime for which people could be sent to prison to take matches into a munitions factory. Some careless young employee, some girl perhaps under twenty, forgetting the importance of that rule, would take a box of matches into a munitions factory.

“No moral turpitude whatever was involved in it, and yet people were sent to prison for doing it, and rightly, because it was only by putting upon them some terrible penalty that you could make people realize the seriousness of the act they were carrying out.

“In the same way, in time of war, when one man’s action may betray so many others and may lead to such great disaster, you attach a penalty to it such as we are asking the committee to pass to-day.”

Whether for these or other reasons, and in spite of very strong objections expressed against the death penalty for cowardice and desertion – which is merely the effect of cowardice – the old fashioned and time-honored institution of death for the coward was preserved in the British army.

Opposing the Death Penalty

Australia went on record, at the outset of the last war, against the death penalty, and sent her contingent to the war on the understanding that the death penalty would not be inflicted – at least without reference to the government of Australia. But Canada abides by the king’s regulations and orders – therefore Canada still employs the death penalty for cowardice.

But since the war, nine other army crimes that were during the war punishable with death before a firing squad – looting, striking a sentry, sleeping on sentry post and so forth – have been deleted from the army regulations. Only two – cowardice and desertion, are left of the laws that have prevailed in the armies of the world since, you might say, Caesar’s time.

Those who were opposed to the death penalty for cowardice in the House of Commons were soldiers -not Labor members.

General Sir Frederick Hall was one.

“I do not know where cowardice starts or where it finishes,” said the general, “but I remember that during the war this point was brought home to me most vividly in the case of a schoolmaster upon whom devolved a rather difficult duty which required a certain amount of courage to be shown. I believe that that man had as much courage as many of those who did not show any fear under similar circumstances.

“I have yet to learn that there is any man, from the highest to the lowest degree, who served in the important danger zones during the war who did not experience some fear come upon him, not once or twice or thrice, but very often. It was not a question of the death penalty that kept men from showing fear. The men felt that they had a job to carry out. I do not think that fear of the death penalty affects the soldier at all; he does his job because he thinks it is his job, and I do not think any fear of the death penalty enters his head.

“When the schoolmaster I have alluded to came to me and told me the condition he was in, I saw the medical officer, and I got him sent back to the base. A week or two after he came back, and I am sure that man was no more desirous of showing cowardice than any other soldier, but fear was in his nervous system.

“He had been brought up in quite a different life, and he possessed the scholastic mind. I told this man what it meant if he acted nervously, and I pointed out to him that his actions might place others in a most difficult position. I want hon. members to realize that this kind of thing deflects upon the men themselves, although I cannot say where cowardice starts or where it finishes.”

There is a curious punch to the ideas Major Hills submitted to the debate. He said:

“You shoot a man for cowardice, but you do not make that man any braver, for he is dead. Do you make his comrades any braver?

“Many members of this House know what it is just before the zero hour – just before going over the top. I am perfectly certain that no man said to himself, ‘I must go forward, or else I shall be shot,’ and I rather mistrust the argument that you make men brave by that threat. … My experience of life, and such experience as I had in the war, have shown me that the greatest men are afraid of something, and that the greatest cowards are brave under some conditions.

“Cowardice is a matter of the greatest difficulty. Some people, fortunately, were not afraid of shells, but they might have been afraid of something else; and a man might be shot just because the special sort of danger of which he was afraid was one which he could not resist. Perhaps the greatest argument which I have against it is this:

“It is all very well to have a death penalty when you have a professional army, and men enlist on terms which they know, but if we were, unfortunately, at war again, our army would not be a professional army, but an army of all the manhood of the nation. What right have we to take a man from the shop or the office and, if his nerves failed under the strain of war, to shoot him? I do not think that we have that right, and I do not think that it would do any good, or make the army braver.

“Courage is something in the man himself, and is not put into him by the idea of any punishment such as death.”

Comically Amended Sentences

As far as Canadians are concerned, there is a point of view that was entirely overlooked by the Scotsmen and Englishmen who were arguing.

And that point is that not only does the death penalty or, as it might be called, the threat of execution, not deter men from being cowards, but it offends and hurts them in a curious way that has its reaction in the psychology of discipline.

Fortunately, I never had anything to do with an execution nor was any man I was ever acquainted with executed for any cause. But it has been my duty, more than once, as an adjutant of infantry, to call a parade and read out the sentence of the court martial on a man. We would muster a parade -deliberately. I would have it made as flimsy and weak a parade as the regulations permitted – the accused soldier would be paraded before the assembled companies, and in a voice about as clear and audible as a shy curate’s, I would mumble over the business of the court martial, reading the charge, the conviction, the sentence of the court.

It would go like this: automatically, a man found guilty of desertion – not an uncommon crime amongst the wilder Canadians – has to be sentenced by the ordinary field general’s court martial to death. But that was merely because the king’s regulations – dating back to hard-boiled days when soldiers were enlisted by the press gang for instance – demanded death as the penalty for desertion. But none of the officers of the court who made the conviction had the slightest expectation that the poor devil would be executed. The case would be passed from brigade to division and from division to corps, each general in turn taking a whack at paring the sentence, until after it had gone through the hands of Sir Arthur Currie, the thing would come back vastly, almost comically amended.

So that the adjutant; standing out in front of the parade, with the accused abjectly facing them under guard, would read out that the accused had been sentenced to death by the court, which sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the brigade commander, which sentence was reduced to ten years penal servitude by the divisional commander, which sentence was reduced and confirmed by the corps commander to two years hard labor.

Aside from the fact that the accused, after spending a more or less hard-worked period of three or four months at some military prison down near the base, In total security and bomb-proofedness, would be restored to his regiment, looking hale and hearty and ready for another desertion if it offered enough excitement, the interesting feature of all this pomp and circumstance is this: that if the adjutant read the charges out loud enough for all the men to hear, there would be a most decided sense of embarrassment and resentment on the part of the men.

What had all this to do with them?

Were we trying to scare them? Them?

If so, we were a pretty poor lot. For was not the officer reading the papers himself a bomb-proof dug-out king? And were any of the officers on parade a bit better than the men, as far as courage went?

That sense of resentment and affront which manifested itself whenever occasion demanded what you might call an “example” being made was most apparent to myself, since my profession as a newspaper man calls for sensitiveness to public feeling of this sort.

Brave Men Experience Fear

It is perfectly safe to say that the death penalty, as far as the Canadians were concerned, created only pathos and bitterness wherever it appeared, and that as far as deterring men from being cowards, it had no effect whatever.

For we had our cowards like all other armies. And those of us who were cowardly were so despite deterrents far more powerful than the fear of death by firing squad.

What is cowardice?

Is it fear? It is not, because ninety-nine per cent of soldiers in the last war experienced fear, and they were not cowards.

Is it submitting to fear, surrendering to fear, so that one fails in one’s duty because of fear?

That is about it. One of the bravest officers I ever knew was walking across a grain field during the battle of Amiens when an unexpected machine gun opened on him. He was in full view of three or four hundred of his comrades. He ducked and lay down, ran and crawled in the most comic fashion that you could imagine. He slithered down banks, lay flattened to earth with his expression clearly visible as he glared back at us and used, we doubt not, profane language at this public reduction of himself to the absurd. At last he got out of range of the enemy gun and rejoined us, shaken and outraged and very crestfallen.

He was no coward. He was performing no duty when this occurred. He was merely strolling across what looked like an innocent field to get a look at some ground we were expecting to attack in an hour or two.

An hour later, that same officer, in the performance of his duty leading his men in battle, executed simple marvels of bravery and courage, exposing himself to fire, attacking strong points and hedges fearlessly, a very demon of courage, who, a short hour before, had been sliding like a scared rabbit from machine gun fire.

And both times he was doing his duty; first, in not getting needlessly killed; second, in risking his life in order to ensure dash and valor to the attack, which called for those very qualities first and above everything.

There are a great many of us who often think that, were it not for a certain occasion when we were cowardly for a moment, we would not be here.

It is that fact which makes us very careful about the use of the word coward even now long after the war. And certainly, during the war, I never heard the word coward used, nor the word cowardice, by any man, though something like two hundred officers and three thousand men passed through my regiment while I was with it. There were poor fellows, timid by nature, whose very shape and physical condition we that of rickety and nervous men, who were spared everything possible by their comrades, because, simply, they were “no good”. They were cowards. In the old meaning of the word, that’s what they were. They swung the lead: that is, they pretended they were sick on every occasion; they had sore feet, pains, they would malinger, which means that they would take steps to make themselves sick, by eating mildly poisonous matter, or by starving themselves, or by the reversal of Christian Science, deliberately thinking and willing themselves to be ill.

They did all duties badly. They were always complaining, grousing.

Cracking Up Under Strain

If you found anybody crouching down in the trenches during a strafe it would be one of them. They were well known in practically every platoon. Nobody minded them. They came in for a lot of unmerciful kidding from the rest of the platoon. And the worst part of their lives was the fact that they knew themselves that they were cowards. But they had reached that state of nerves, or they were naturally born with that state of mind, that they did not care, so long as they were spared.

The others did not revenge themselves on these chaps. In fact, they were rewarded. For they escaped all patrols and dirty Jobs. No officer or n.c.o. wanted them with them. And if any soft bombproof jobs came along, such as working at a divisional dump or helping at a laundry or bath house, or turning the crank at a movie tent, these abject, timid fellows and not the good brave men were rewarded. Not only could we not spare the good men, but there was more or less feeling about taking bombproof jobs. I have known men to refuse them indignantly.

I had a sergeant who had come in June, 1916, and who, after the Somme, Vimy and Passchendaele, was getting old at the game. Perfectly natural. He had seen much war, close up. He had seen scores of his men killed and mangled in every conceivable fashion. He had had dozens of his comrades and chums pass on to their doubtful reward. He had had his own hair breadth escapes from that indescribable destruction that modern machine warfare dishes up. He could recall them easily enough, I suppose, in those long night watches, where we drifted, lonely and alone, in a world of ghostly light and shadow. He began to crack up a little. He became irritable and his hair began to grow gray at the sides. He was in his late thirties. At home he had a wife and four little boys. One night we had a patrol. Before going out, the darkness did not conceal from me that he was nervous and trembling and that he had a little trouble with his voice. It was husky – ah, what a familiar symptom!

He was not, I venture to say, one-half as frightened as I was at that moment. But I was younger, greener and had a little more of what might either be intelligence or low cunning – I could hide my feelings better for those several reasons. We had a rotten time of it. No enemy was met. No shot was fired. But of all patrols I ever remember, that was the jumpiest, most nerve-racking, for I knew the sergeant was windy, which made me windy, and the sergeant sensed my condition and the men caught it, like a yawning fit, froze us. I was a rag when we re-entered the trench.

Two days later I had a chat with my old sergeant and put it up to him: would I try to wangle him a job somewhere? There were some splendid jobs to be had as an instructor at the divisional school, and I was sure the colonel would admit the sergeant had had a long siege and would appoint him to the next vacancy.

What do you suppose that sergeant did?

He flew into a rage.

What did I think he was? A shell-shock? Who was I to accuse him of being jumpy? Was there a man or officer in the regiment who had done more real fighting? He always thought I was his friend, and then I go and suggest a thing like this! Instructor at a school! Refuge for broken-down old women!

He stayed on a few weeks, getting rockier and rockier, until the men began to feel it, and all the splendid two years’ reputation of this valiant sergeant began to count for naught.

Where does cowardice enter in here? Not by a thousand miles was this man a coward. Yet if we had had a jam of some kind about that time, I am perfectly sure the old sergeant would have failed, not from cowardice, but from nervous exhaustion. For he ended up in tears, asking to be relieved, and sent to some place to recover his old fire.

Oh, it has a thousand aspects. I have known timid, nervous men who were the scariest mortals imaginable at the start, but who, as time went on, and experience stiffened them, became bolder and gamer every month. It is a fact.

We had an officer join us and the minute he came in we smiled secretly at one another. For he was so obviously the raw material of shell-shock, as we termed all limitations as to courage. He was a mamma’s boy, by the look of him. He was assigned to one of the companies and plans were made to get rid of him at the first opportunity to some command job away from the regiment where he wouldn’t have much rough work to do. Yes, that’s the way it worked. For we were hanged if we wanted our jobs made more difficult by the shortcomings of junior officers.

For month or two he was the perspiring image of alarm and fear. He could change color from red to white and red again quicker than any man I knew, to the sound of an incoming shell.

One night there was a rumpus on our left front, a German patrol unquestionably came close to our front, either to raid us or to bring us gifts of some kind, we didn’t know. But a Lewis gun that mysteriously and unexpectedly appeared some distance out in No Man’s Land and raked flank-wise along the raiding party’s course, put it all to an end.

A Hero of Fiction Type

When the hero was sought, he was found in very perspiring and nervously giggling lieutenant, who said:

“My sergeant and I distinctly saw, from the side, against a distant flare a mile or so north of us, a group of Germans walking about in No Man’s Land, up opposite the next company. So I ordered out a Lewis gun and just as we got into a position to fire, their barrage came down. So we caught them, curiously enough, exactly at the moment their raid started.”

“Did you take the sergeant with you?” we demanded, expecting to get at the secret of this dandy stunt.

“How could I?” cried the nervous lieutenant. “I could not leave the trench without one of us in charge, could I?”

No. He did it alone. And when we cautiously inquired of the number one of the gun crew, it transpired that the lieutenant, from his superior position, had insisted on firing the gun himself.

“I took quite a good mark in machine gunnery at school in England,” blushed the lieutenant unhappily when the accusation was made in the mess, later.

That was the start of the most curious evolution I encountered overseas: a man who actually got better and bolder as time and experience went on. This chap ended up with a reputation for daring – soft, polite daring, that belongs in fiction rather than in fact.

“Once you get the hang of the thing …” he used to say.

There were some of us who were what civilians call cowards all the time; and all of us were cowards upon occasion, except, of course, those blood-in-the-eye lads who worked back of the line, or at the bakeries at the base. For it was curious how bloodthirsty people got as the distance increased from the front line. Why, we poor fellows in the front line were nambly-pamby compared to the gallant bayonet instructors over on the far side of England.

No official facts have ever been produced respecting the number of Canadians who were executed during the great war. It has been a carefully guarded secret, to spare the kin of those few who were victims of a quite meaningless institution. But it is supposed that there were twenty-two executions amongst Canadians, most of them in the early part of the war, before there had crystallized that quite distinct and characteristic Canadian discipline which was as noble a thing as any other kind of discipline history recounts. Most of these executions would have been for desertion. A few were certainly for looting. Outrageous cases of looting, where men simply went amuck and neglected important duties to loot – cases where example would really count, since the men appeared to be getting something out of it.

But as for the example of a coward – in modern warfare, so slowly does it move, and on such machine made scale, the example of a coward can rarely be seen.

And when seen, it merely causes that twinge or gust of pity or contempt which is the thing men fear from their comrades more than bullets –

Bullets fired at twenty paces, at a white sheet, on which is marked a round, red circle.

Editor’s Note: This was a very controversial aspect of the First World War in Canada, as can been seen by the content of the article at the time, as well as subsequent debates in the decades since. A total of 25 Canadians were executed during World War One, 22 for desertion, 1 for cowardice, and 2 for murder. The ones not charged with murder were posthumously pardoned on 16 August 2006. The concept of PTSD (“shell-shock” in WW1, and “battle fatigue” in WW2) was not understood at the time.

“What has happened to your friends, the French?” asked my editor the other morning.

He tossed across to me the newspapers containing the dispatches of France’s demands in respect to submarines. France was “rattling the sabre,” they said; the new “mailed fist in Europe.”

Let’s see…

The last place I saw action was at Cambrai, the end of September, 1918.

We were lying in the Marcoing Line. Through the mist of dawn the towers and spires of Cambrai stood up before us a mile away – our goal, our proud objective.

It was as if we were in High Park, advancing on Toronto. A meadow valley lay between. A few advance troops were plodding across, like workers bent cityward at break of day. But over our heads swept an endless succession of wheezy shells which thumped and crashed on to the edge of the misty city ahead of us. And far and near the air pulsed and jiggled and hissed with machine gun fire, ours and his.

In the sky the first aeroplanes were greeting the sun. They circled and slowly swooped earthward, peering, seeking, bursting off their machine-guns occasionally, or dropping bombs on to stealthy Germans scuttling through the streets of Cambrai. As I lay, belly tight to earth, I watched these airy ships; for in one of them, I knew, was a small brother of mine, wearing a white and scarlet helmet that I would recognize if ….

And while I lay there, aching my eyes against the misty dawn, I beheld a strange vision.

The towers and roots of Cambrai faded, and I saw instead a queer, walled town the name of which was Camaracum, and it was one of the cities of a people named the Norvil.

It seemed to be a scene from the very long ago, for the walls were heavy and crude, and the people moving about them were clad in rough and primitive garments.

A procession approached the city of Camaracum: soldiers in short kilts and sandals, armed with spears and shields, and after a great advance of these soldiers into the walled city came men on horses, one of whom was the emperor of Rome, visiting the outposts of his empire.

That scene fades: and now I see groups of rough, savage men swarming at the walls of Camaracum. These are the Franks, barbarians from the north. The time is 445 Anno Domini. And after a brief struggle the Roman garrison is driven from Camaracum: and Clodion, chieftain of the Franks, makes it his city.

Along time passes, for I see Camaracum greatly changed. A spire rises from within its walls. And into it rides a cavalcade of men in armor with banners, at the head of whom rides Charlemagne, Charles the Great, emperor of Rome. The thing is about the year 800 A.D., and Charlemagne makes the city or Camaracum one of his bulwarks against the heathen Magyars and marauders from the north and east.

Then down the Scheldt and the rivers from the seas come ghostly craft, the long ships of the Norsemen, fierce pirates who slay and destroy wherever their long ships will carry them. And they come, in the year 870 A.D., to this same walled city of Camaracum and burn it, sack it and destroy it.

But it rises again, its castles and spires and strong walls. And the vision shows it, all through the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, being stormed and captured, burned and sacked by the factions of various bishops. For Camaracum, since the fifth century of our Lord, has been a bishop’s see.

The vision moves swiftly. It is the year 1595 A.D., and the Spaniards are besieging’ the castled city of Camaracum. Charles the Fifth fortifies it with a great citadel.

The years fly. in 1793 It is the Austrians laying vain siege to this ancient city. And in 1793 the revolution comes: the mob, in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, destroys the old cathedral, burns castles and palaces, and ruin descends still again upon Camaracum.

At last it is the years 1815 to 1818, Napoleon has just fled, and Camaracum, the city of the Nervil, the city of the Caesars, the outpost of Charlemagne’s empire, is headquarters for three years of the British army of occupation under Wellington in France!

Indeed, you have guessed it, reader.

Camaracum is Cambrai. Cambrai, as it lay before us in the hands of the Germans, is the Camaracum of old, that ancient and embattled city.

As we crouched there in the dawn the destroying shells were simply renewing a destruction already as old as history. The long ships of the Norsemen and the strange ships in the sky which I so tenderly watched were of one purpose.

My men, tense beside me in the trench, were plying an ancient trade: Roman, Frank, Viking, Goth, Magyar, Spaniard, Austrian – all had, through the thousands of years, lay thus with grim faces turned upon Camaracum.

And Cambrai is one of the lesser historical cities in France.

So I said to my editor:

“It is a thousand years since William of Normandy brought an invading army against our forefathers.

“But in France they have known war and the sack and pillage through unbroken centuries.

“If I do not agree with their militaristic policy, I can at least wholly sympathize with their caution.”

And I can still see the pillar of black smoke that rose vastly out of Camaracum as the Huns of 1918 fled before us into the north.

Editor’s Note: The Washington Naval Conference was held between November 1921 and February 1922., which resulted in the Washington Naval Treaty. The goal was to prevent an arms race by limiting naval construction. The British wanted the abolition of the submarine, but the French opposed. The conference ended without an agreement to restrict submarines.

By Gregory Clark, December 31, 1943.

By Air Courier to the Star Weekly from Naples

Between my hotel in Naples and the temporary home of old and famous Benedetto Croce in Sorrento, lie 30 miles – in every foot of which occurs not one field, not one meadow, not one open garden.

It is just endless human habitation. Naples; then the suburbs of Naples; then the villages adjoining Naples, in continuous contact of house, hovel, wall, beautiful but forbidding villa, humanity crawling amidst it everywhere.

So that by the time my jeep drew up in front of the massive flower-laden (in November!) wall of the villa of the late William Waldorf Astor in Sorrento, where Benedetto Croce has had sanctuary the past year or so, I was already numbed and saddened for his answer to my question – “What is the future of Italy now?”

His answer was – a regency for the five-year-old prince, grandson of the present King Victor Emmanuel, which would allow 15 or 20 years before that young gentleman could become sufficient of a king to interfere with still one more of the countless attempts for Italy to work out a political system that will bring her abreast of the western world in freedom, in comfort, in stability – or abreast of us in our dreams of those things.

This regency would get rid of both the king and the crown prince who suffer some share of the Italian people’s furious reaction to fascism. They are tainted. The regency would permit Badoglio or some other trusted or half-trusted individual to act as head of the government, surrounded by ministers representing both the Socialists, who want a republic, and the anti-Socialists, who feel safer with a king.

There are not a few in Italy who want neither. They want exactly what all of us should have foreseen as the reaction to fascism when it collapsed. And that is communism. There is the rub in Italy.

All the forces, individual and political, in Britain, America, France and everywhere else in the shivering old-fashioned world who helped build up fascism in Italy and Germany as a barricade against communism failed to foresee that if fascism failed, a great dammed-up force of the thing they were trying so desperately to dam back, would burst upon them. Italy right now is the ground over which that dam is to burst – if a whole horde of excited and anxious people, not all of them Italian, do not bear false witness.

In going to see Benedetto Croce, who is 78 years old, and who was already a world-famous philosopher and scientist 40 years ago, and minister of education for three years prior to fascism, I went with no political interest whatever. I am just one of those thousands of Canadians and tens of thousands of Americans who for the past three months have been walking through Italy looking upon nationwide spectacle of poverty, degradation, despair and ruin.

We do not need to be politicians to know that something has got to be done about Italy. We need only be citizens of Canada and the United States to know that when this war is all over and we go back home, we will have memories to bear, opinions to hold and votes to cast.

Across the Bay of Naples from the villa window in Sorrento we could see Naples. Along the waterfront, as modern and up-to-date as any great seaport in the world, lay utter and pitiless ruin. Not millions, but billions of dollars have gone up under our bombs and German demolition blasts. By some infernal humor of war, we had left that part of Naples which was old and historic and muddled and narrow and typical of everything Italy has been trying to escape from intact. But everything modern and new and big, everything that represented Italy’s effort to escape from the past, her port, her shipbuilding yards, her great modern factories and warehouses of every conceivable line of industry, we had reduced to tangled ruins of bent steel and heaped rubble.

“And further north,” said Croce, “in Milan, Turin and Genoa, the ruin and loss are worse.”

“It is not this ruin I wanted to ask you about,” I started. “We have lately fought and marched several hundred miles from the very toe of Italy through an Italy I am sure not one of the thousands of Canadians who saw it believed was possible in this day and age. Tiny villages which in America would house 500 people, housing 5,000. Living conditions so remote from all modem conceptions of public health, let alone human dignity, that it seemed to us we were dreaming. Peasants in a world from which we thought peasants had gone long, long ago. Women acting as beasts of burden. Slavery, with no other word for it, everywhere. Here and there, a county town with a brave show of a few modern buildings in the midst. But around the back, the same old filth and degradation. If it takes billions to restore those factories over there along the proud front of Naples and in Milan and Turin and all over the north of Italy, how many more billions will it take to sweep Italy free of the 16th century?”

Croce may have been a little offended at my naive and unctuous question. But his answer was this:

“If we can have a pause, free of political turmoil, long enough to permit the best elements of the Italian people to express themselves to one another, I am confident that not only is there a sufficient number of those best elements to establish, by legislation, a reasonable and happy solution for Italy, but that the sufferings Italy has experienced in the last war, in this war and under fascism between the two, have finally inspired in the Italian people a mass desire for peace and security that will survive under whatever world politics the future may surround us with.

“I was offered, along with my friend Count Sforza, a ministry under the king when he escaped from Rome and set up his government in the south with Badoglio. I refused. I said I had no ambition but that I had 78 years! I am giving anyone who asks counsel and advice. My advice is always the same. Seek a pause in events in which to bring together all the parties, all the creeds, all the sections and interests of Italy. And in that pause, free from political struggle against one another or against the world, work out Italy’s salvation. Does that answer include both the proud modern cities and the peasants?”

“How long would it take to set up this regency in the present confusion?” I asked. “And is the regency the majority opinion of the national committee?”

“The regency suggested itself to the majority of the national committee, said Croce, “when it was realized no self-respecting experienced public man in Italy could associate himself with either the king or crown prince in view of their lack of character throughout the Fascist regime. It would take us only a matter of days to set up the regency if we had the facilities of press and public halls, which of course are denied at present. Above all, however, we do not want a coup de force, a coup d’etat, another party foisting itself upon Italy. We have had enough of those. Garibaldi was one. Mussolini another. It matters not who or how good the leader, or how bad. To force there is always the reaction. In God’s name let Italy have a rest, a pause, a time to relax and talk and think freely. I am certain that if the United Nations do not understand on what a brink Italy now stands, just another and worse confusion will descend upon us.”

Benedetto Croce all his long life has been an educator and a thinker. And in this hour, he thinks what Italy needs is a period of education. He was born on the island of Ischia, near Capri. When he was a small child, his mother was killed in a great earthquake and he himself was buried for many hours in the ruins. Then, in his prime years he was all but buried under the ruins of fascism. But he survived both catastrophes. He has no fear of the powers of nature, geological or human. But when the earthquake is over he believes in clearing away the ruin, not calling down another quake to reshape the ruins in the hope that they will tumble straight.

One of Benedetto Croce’s most famous contributions to modern philosophy is his writing on the absolute. He maintains that there is no absolute fact, no absolute good, no absolute truth or even absolute beauty. He has defined the forces that bear on life to change, imperceptibly but eternally, the absolute. A sort of Einstein in the realm outside mathematics.

He has lectured in America, France, Britain, at all the greatest universities of the world. He was already a very great man when fascism rose in Italy. So famous, indeed, that when he refused to join the Fascist party, and when his non-co-operation with the Fascists became a dangerous scandal to the party, there was not a thing they dared do to him.

He did not flee the country, as other anti-Fascists did. He just went ahead non-resisting and non-co-operating. He had been made a senator by the king in 1921. After fascism, he simply declined to take his seat. When they tried to convert his writings into support for the Fascist ideal, he immediately published corrections but in such terms that nothing could be done about it. To scientist, no truth can be adduced in support of anything. It is just truth – as far as it can be seen at the moment!

And now the only advice he can give is to cease believing you have the truth; cease fighting for what you conceive to be the truth; and to get together with all your fellowmen and try to find the truth among you all. All – including peasant women staggering day and night under huge burdens

And all – including such density of population that in my jeep journey from my hotel in Naples to the late William Waldorf Astor’s villa, with high thick walls for keeping people out, and hanging lovely and high over the famous Bay of Sorrento and of Naples, I did not pass in 30 miles, one open stretch of meadow, one garden, but only continuous human habitation, wall touching wall, house-house, hovel-hovel, and all swarming and crawling with humanity, ragged, stunned sleep-walking, bewildered in a far deeper bewilderment than I ever have seen in any humanity, but which I have seen in the animal kingdom, among herds of cattle in the stockyards, and among corrals and in herds of sheep driven along dangerous tumultuous town streets.

On my way home from seeing Croce I asked my jeep driver what he thought was the chief problem of Italy.

“Too many Italians,” was his solution, as he nipped the jeep in and out amidst the ragged, scampering, sleep-walking throngs.

Too many, too confused, too pitiably victimizing one another in their ultimate hunger of body and soul; too pitiably, with wide dark blank eyes, trying to victimize us in small pitiable things, so that the tough guys among us curse them for swindlers and the soft guys among us can scarce forbear to weep.

I am thinking this minute of my backyard in Toronto, full of peace, full of security. Thinking also of my jeep driver’s farm north of Orangeville on this afternoon brown and quiet and far-flung and with nothing moving. But in the barns, the stables, in the mow, in the house, in the kitchen, in the pantry, in the milk shed, in the rocking chair beside the stove, in the kettle simmering on the wide hot top – peace, security.

I have heard only one man laugh in Italy and that was old Benedetto Croce – you pronounce it Craw-chay – when he described how his king invited him to become a minister of this, his ruined and wrecked native land. And that was when he said, from the security of his age and of his pride these past 30 years in which he pursued only truth:

“I have no ambition: I have only 78 years!”

His laughter was the saddest thing to hear.

Editor’s Notes: Greg was a war correspondent in Italy at the time. Benedetto Croce was a Greg described him, and did serve in government again after the war was over. He was also President of PEN International from 1949 until 1952, and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times.

After the war, King Victor Emmanuel III had tried to save the monarchy by abdicating on May 9, 1946 with his son becoming King Umberto II. A constitutional referendum was held on June 2 1946 where the Republicans won, and the monarchy was abolished.

Pietro Badoglio was an Italian general during both World Wars. He became Prime Minister of Italy after the fall of the Fascists. Carlo Sforza was an Italian diplomat and anti-fascist politician.