Mud, Blood, and Poppycock

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

Gordon Corrigan Mud, Blood and Poppycock

(London: Cassell, 2003)

ISBN 0 304 35955 6 hdbk. pp. 431 (£18.99) Illustrations and maps

The dust jacket on Gordon Corrigan’s new book, Mud, Blood & Poppycock, states that ‘this will overturn everything you thought you knew about Britain and The First World War’ and it certainly tries. Corrigan, a no-nonsense ex-Gurkha Major, has little sympathy for the popular opinion of the war as futile, unnecessary and conducted by hidebound generals, unaware of the sufferings of their men. He believes that ‘it is easy for the public to criticise, and by extension to believe the worst of the Great War. It is almost impossible for modern Britain even to begin to understand what war is or was like’. Corrigan is determined to change that. Just by glancing at the titles of the fourteen chapters, you can see how eager Corrigan is to tear apart the myths of the war. Chapter titles include ‘the horrors of the trenches’, ‘Government-sponsored polo clubs’, ‘a needless slaughter’, ‘more needless slaughter’ and so on. One can guess what they are about.

Mud, Blood & Poppycock is Corrigan’s third book and joins an increasing number of recent accounts, such as Robin Neillands’s The Great War Generals on the Western Front (1999) and Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (2001) that seek to remind the British public that there was more to the war than simply ‘lions led by donkeys’. Corrigan staunchly defends the record of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, placing its experience firmly within the ‘external’ school of thought, those who believe that the Army’s difficulties were principally the result of external factors. He believes that the problems suffered by the BEF – especially in the early years of the war - were the inevitable result of the intricacies of the French alliance, the rapid, dislocating expansion of the army and of course, the ever present excellence of the German Imperial Army.

As well as trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the BEF, Corrigan covers a wide spread of topics, from a frank discussion of the ‘lost generation’, the performance of British commanders to the arrival of the Americans and their impact. Indeed, few subjects are not game for a thorough ‘dusting’ by the author. One chapter in particular examines the continuing controversy over the ‘shot at dawn’ campaign and the subject of capital courts martials in the British Army. Corrigan – as might be expected – has little sympathy for most of the men who were shot. He concludes, after a brief look at some of the well-known cases, that it ‘may have been hard justice, but it was justice’ adding that ‘this was a hard war’. It is a point he continually makes.

Although much of what Corrigan writes about the British Army is well researched, balanced and undoubtedly correct, he sometimes stretches his arguments a little too far and this is perhaps the greatest problem with the book. This can be detected in Corrigan’s discussion of British commanders, when he is a little too eager to see the best in some of the more obviously sub-standard leaders. Lieutenant-General Richard Haking was certainly one of those ‘duffers’ that every army is blessed with from time to time. Yet Corrigan passes over his role in the Fromelles disaster of July 1916 by saying that it was at least partly useful because it helped to stem German reinforcements to the Somme. One feels Corrigan has been reading too many of the after-action reports that were written to put a positive light on a needless and badly planned battle. Corrigan shows how the BEF undoubtedly contained some outstanding leaders of men – Plumer, Monash and Maxse spring to mind – but Haking was not one of them.

Corrigan’s account of the Somme campaign of 1916 is also similarly incomplete and he glosses over some of its more sinister periods. For example, many see the nadir of British command in the war as the events around High Wood (between July and September 1916). The wood could have been taken at the start of the campaign, when the position was undefended, but for several reasons it was not occupied. When it was finally decided to take the shell-torn wood, German reinforcements had moved in and tenaciously clung onto the position for months. Corrigan devotes a paragraph to High Wood and concludes that ‘the wood would not be taken until the next phase of the battle, by infantry of 47 Division, with tanks in support’. Yet he does not investigate any further. The straining structure of British command was exposed at High Wood when Major-General Barter (GOC 47 Division) was sacked after taking the wood at great cost using tactics imposed on him from above and against which he had ineffectually protested. These were not merely ‘external’ problems; there were ‘internal’ ones as well.

Other debatable points include Corrigan’s rather wishful thinking about the British Army after the Third Battle of Ypres, when he claims that it came out of the fighting ‘in good order, hardened, its morale undamaged, and ready in 1918 to be the only army capable of taking the offensive against the Germans’. This is a little too sanguine and ignores the state of utter exhaustion many units of the BEF had been reduced to by the end of the year. He is also somewhat dismissive of General John Pershing, the commander of the American Armies in France, whom he claims did not have a chance to show how good a commander he was because the war ended too soon. Pershing’s greatness lay not in his abilities as a field commander, but in his skill in building up the American forces into a viable European army and only putting them into battle when they were ready. Perhaps if the BEF had been led by someone as focused and independent-minded as Pershing in the early years of the war, its teething problems would have been considerably lessened as it would not have been thrown into premature offensives.

This is perhaps nitpicking. The vast majority of Mud, Blood & Poppycock is written with a wide knowledge of military history and a firm grasp of the controversies of the war. Many of Corrigan’s points deserve wider circulation as they would undoubtedly still some of the more wildly ridiculous myths of the war. Corrigan’s chapter about ‘the horrors of the trenches’ is particularly valuable and reminds the reader that ‘British soldiers did not spend four years of war in the firing line’, but were rotated between the front, support and reserve lines with great efficiency. The chapter includes a breakdown of the activities of 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers in January 1917. The month includes church parades, concerts, baths, drill and training but precious little fighting or dying in the trenches.

Corrigan’s book is a well-written and enjoyable account that will be eagerly devoured by those who see the experience of the British Army in the First World War in a positive light, but it is doubtful how much impact it will actually have. For those on the other side of the debate, Mud, Blood & Poppycock will be seen – as a review by Gerard DeGroot in BBC History Magazine believed – as reactionary, brutal, ‘bludgeoning’ and ‘at best incomplete and very often simply wrong’. So Corrigan will probably end up preaching to the converted. His book is ten years too late. Most of the leading historians of the war now recognise that the ‘lions led by donkeys’ view will no longer suffice. The war was far too complex, vast and unprecedented for such a simple explanation, and in some ways Mud, Blood & Poppycock is perhaps too simplistic. Although it admirably rubbishes some of the caricatures of the war, it does not really add a great deal to ongoing scholarship, especially the inner workings of the British Expeditionary Force and the more mundane subjects of logistics and staff work. Despite its faults, Mud, Blood & Poppycock does exactly what it says on the dust jacket.

Nicholas Lloyd

Centre for First World War Studies (http://www.firstworldwar.bham.ac.uk)

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