1914: THE LAST STAND OF THE THIN RED LINE 121
their leaders were wavering and beginning to retire. He also, during the
day, carried messages over the fire-swept ground.^50
Ritchie’s last tattoo notwithstanding, the Victorian Army was a thing of the
past by the end of 1914:
There is not much left of the old Army and the new campaign is going
to be fought and won by a great half-trained National Army – where
you’ve got to take what you can get and not laugh at people for being a
certain class or making fools of themselves. But if the old Army is going
to be worth its salt and remain the backbone of the show, it’s got without
jealousy and in humbleness to allow itself to be absorbed into a less
efficient whole, and have amateurs put over them and see daily laughable
mistakes and old lessons relearnt in bitterness and go on helping without
superior bearing. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the above is either not
rising to the occasion or anything but a self-satisfied self-seeker. We’ve
all got to simply sacrifice anything for anesprit d’armee. The end of the war
will depend on it.^51
As these troops and their commanders floundered toward a new tactical
doctrine to deal with the conditions of the Western Front, a new heroic
paradigm would be imposed by industrial-scale warfare.
While the Victorian ideal died on the Western Front, it did manage to
survive for a time in other arenas of the war. In the Royal Flying Corps and
on the fringes of empire the pattern of the past managed to prevail until
swept away in the bureaucratic standardization that followed the war. In
the air the new technology of flight somehow conferred an almost mystical,
romantic aura of heroism on the brave aviator.
The status of the military flier in the public mind was summed up by no
less than Herbert George Wells:
Every aviator who goes up to fight, I don’t mean to reconoitre but to
fight, will fight all the more gladly with two kindred alternatives in his
mind, a knighthood or the prompt payment of a generous life assurance
policy to his people. Every man who goes up and destroys either an
aeroplane or a Zeppelin in the air should, I hold, have a knighthood if he
gets down alive.^52
Wells and the general public overestimated the offensive capacity of aircraft
in the Great War, where the primary contribution of aviation was the very
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