CHARNEL: A Phantasmagoria of the First World War

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26th September 1915 – 11a.m. 21st and 24th Divisions, composed of new volunteers, recently transferred from England have marched twenty-five miles through the night in heavy rain from Bethune. They haven’t eaten for almost two days and arrive at the front line, exhausted. There are no kitchens and, without being allowed food and rest, they are thrown straight into the attack.
Ten ranks, each containing a thousand men walking side by side in close formation march forward with bayonets fixed across No-Man’s Land towards the German trenches.
A few soldiers of the 24th reach the German second line but wire cutters have not been issued in the haste of disposition. Some men try to climb the wire, others fling themselves sobbing at it, others try to burrow under it. One man is seen scurrying up and down the wire trying to find a gap through it, until he is shot in the head.
In three hours the two British Reserve Divisions have lost 8,000 men, the Germans none.
This incident occurred during the Battle of Loos.
It was followed by similar battles in the First World War.
Why ‘World’ War? How did six great Empires collide?
Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa and Great Britain fought for the Empire alongside 1.2 million soldiers of the Indian Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, Gurkhas, Mahrattas and Dogras.
The British Expeditionary Force of 85,000 faced the might of seven German Armies in August 1914. By 1918 Britain had 4million men under arms and five Armies in the field.
On Christmas Day 1916, Prime Minister Lloyd George ‘What a day to be devoted by a British Cabinet to the consideration of a plan to send two million young Christians to rend and tear each other to pieces!’ The Plan is the Battle of Passchendaele.
Out of a population of 70 million, Germany mobilised 13million conscripts, of which 2million died. France’s population of 38million mobilised 8million, of which 11/2 million died. 1 million British & Empire personnel died. Britain lost 750,000. 41,000 soldiers lost at least one limb. 12 million of the youth of the combatant nations were slain and 20 million mutilated.
Told from the poems of the dead and the mad, the memoirs of politicians and from stained glass windows, museum archives, personal correspondence and phantasms of the imagination [the reality was far worse], this chronological story transposes the horror of that war into the new millennium.