HEROISM IN EVOLUTION, 1915–1916 139
the arriving officers had seen enough lassitude in the ranks to comment on
it as a problem early in 1915.
To Sotheby life in the trenches (even before he had experienced it)
represented a certain kind of heroism in and of itself. Reflecting on those men
who had suffered self-inflicted wounds or purposely exposed an extremity
to enemy fire to ‘catch a Blighty,’ he could not bring himself to class them
with the malingerers and deserters who had never seen the front:
There can be no doubt that it needs & calls for exceptional endurance and
fortitude to live through 36 hours & sometimes many days in a trench
with mud to your knees, a drenching rain, perhaps a sharp frost, & little or
no food, when there is exceptional vigilance on the enemy’s part against
relief & food supplies coming up. So people in England, if they hear of
these people, should not condemn them without giving them a hearing
as all people are not blessed with the same endurance & vitality.
The cure for such malaise was, in his opinion, ‘an advance & none of this
trench warfare.’^29
The total casualties were on a scale Britain and the empire had never
before experienced, but the casualty figures among the VC winners for 1915
were not appalling. In fact, when the advances in medical treatment and
inclusion of posthumous recommendations are considered, the injury/death
rates of winners are not that far off the nineteenth-century statistics.
The figures for the Boer War round out to 59 percent with no wound
reported, 30 percent wounded, and 8 percent either died of wounds or
killed in action, for a total casualty rate of 38 percent. Once again, it must
be remembered that the posthumous alternative was not a possibility before
1900, and for the remainder of the Boer War it was a limited option. Only
in the third quarter of 1915, which included the big push at Loos, did the
figures show any real variance from the Boer War statistics (Table 7.2).
While these figures remain fairly close to the parameters established in
South Africa they run higher than the casualty rate for the Army as a whole.
During the course of the war the British Empire fielded 8,904,000 men. Of
those, an average of 78 percent were in the combat arms during the course
of the war. These troops sustained 2,174,675 combat casualties, generating
a 31 percent casualty rate.^30 Thus, Victoria Cross winners at 47 percent
sustained a higher rate than the rest of the combat troops.
The ratio of officer to enlisted Victoria Crosses remained fairly constant,
with a brief aberration in the first quarter of 1915. In the nineteenth
century the officer class averaged 46 percent of the VCs awarded. For
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