204 AWARDED FOR VALOUR
the award. Only 12 percent of the pre-war Crosses had any connection with
the aristocracy (surprisingly, given the proportion of the officer corps with
aristocratic connections), and as the circumstances of the posthumous Cross
for Lieutenant Coghill demonstrate, aristocratic influence did not guarantee
the bestowal of the award.
The romantic conception of heroism and warfare could not survive on the
Western Front. Warfare had become an industrial process, a vast corporate
effort to slaughter the enemy in the most efficient manner possible. The
nature of the war was summed up in the machine gun – a device, a machine
designed to kill people with production-line speed and precision without
a hint of individual distinction, its victims as faceless and nameless as the
lock-stepping proletarians of Fritz Lang’sMetropolis. Soldiers became nothing
more than another statistic in an economy of scale, a combat consumable to
be processed from the raw material of the civilian, stockpiled along with the
boots and artillery shells, and expended as dispassionately as a rifle cartridge.
The human cost of industrial-scale warfare exceeded the wildest dreams
and darkest nightmares of the Victorian concept. The magnitude of the
bloodletting made all previous wars pale in comparison. The futility of a war
effort in which ‘battles’ lasted months on end and ‘advances’ were measured
in yards per offensive in return for casualty lists larger than the Army’s
pre-war establishment muted the significance of individual feats of heroism.
The capture of a single machine-gun emplacement, while a tremendous
accomplishment on the company level, did not break the enemy’s position
in the same fashion as breaching a gate or carrying an embrasure had in the
nineteenth century.
This new type of warfare, with anonymous death and seemingly futile
individual sacrifices, bred a new command concept of heroism. Once the
stalemate of the Western Front fully developed, the war became a contest
of attrition. Attrition merely required soldiers who killed the enemy in a
positive ratio to their own losses. Soldiers killed or wounded recovering
casualties did not contribute to this goal, and in the minds of the high
command, they therefore did not deserve the highest accolades of heroism.
Thus the belief arose that to win the VC ‘you have to do a bit of fighting –
you have to shoot somebody.’ By the end of the war Haig’s Western
Front concept of the aggressive, man-killing hero had become the British
paradigm, and has remained in effect to the end of the century and beyond.
With this new concept of heroism came new uses of heroism. The hero
was used as an example of desired behavior. This is not exactly a new idea,
as the recognition of virtue as much as its counterpart, delinquency, was
a regular feature of military discipline from the institution of the Good
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