I need at least 10 reasons to why soldiers continued to fight during WW1
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Answer:
Brig-Gen James Jack saw the First World War up close for longer than most. A regular officer who fought on the Western Front almost the whole way through, he was an austere man whose diary provides one of the most honest surviving descriptions of the war. On November 11, 1918, even Jack’s stiff upper lip seems at last to have quivered. He wrote of “a frightful four years” during which his soldiers “have suffered bravely, patiently and unselfishly, hardships and perils beyond even the imagination of those, including soldiers, who have not shared them”.
For us, 100 years on, it is the endurance of the millions of soldiers on all sides that mystifies and fascinates. What is remarkable is not how many men ran away or broke down, but how few did. Very few tried to duck their duty. Out of five million British soldiers, fewer than 9,000 were tried for cowardice, desertion and mutiny . Only 287 were executed for these crimes.
For all the myths of savage discipline, statistically you were two and a half thousand times more likely to be killed by the enemy than by your own side. Cases of psychological breakdown were similarly rare. About one in 20 British and German soldiers suffered a nervous disorder.
But psychiatric casualties made up only about one in eight battle casualties.
Why did so many stick it out? Some reasons never change. Ask a soldier in Helmand what motivates him to fight and most likely he’ll look embarrassed and mumble something about doing it for his mates. As soldier Richard Williams wrote home: “It is only the spirit of brotherliness and mutual helpfulness that makes the thing tolerable.”
But other factors were also important. It’s almost impossible to generalise. Each soldier found his strength in all sorts of places. In untrendy but eternal concepts such as duty, loyalty to regiment and King and Country. In the bottle. In God. In superstition. In humour – often of the blackest kind. In adapting to and making the best of even the most horrific environments. In hatred of the enemy and the thirst for revenge. In protecting home and family. In professional pride. For a few, in a disturbing love of killing. For many, in the youthful self-deception which says “it’ll never happen to me”. And, in almost every case, from knowing that dinner, relief, rest, even leave, were only hours or days away. Even when things were at their worst, they were always about to get better.
So millions of men on all sides found it within themselves to endure and to fight. No one could have forced them to do it. No one could have fooled so many into doing it for so long. We can see this when we look at the (very rare) mutinies which took place. They were hardly ever refusals to bear arms.
Between 1914 and 1918, the British Army had only one: the 1917 Étaples mutiny, portrayed with fine drama but dismal history in The Monocled Mutineer in 1986. This was not a brave and principled refusal to fight but a tawdry rampage by 1,000 men in protest at conditions at a transit camp.
The same year saw a much larger mutiny in the French army. Perhaps 40,000 soldiers refused to leave their trenches. But this was also primarily a strike about conditions of service rather than a rejection of their broader duty. They remained ready to defend but refused to attack.
When they received concessions, including increased leave, they returned to action and were soon operating at full capacity again.
Eventually, of course, morale did collapse. Not in the British Army, where even German historians acknowledge that it remained more or less constant throughout, but in the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Historians still argue about how widespread this was, exactly when it started, and why. What is clear is that about one in every five German soldiers on the Western Front raised the white flag and surrendered to Allies in July-November 1918.
Some of them, infected by Bolshevism, refused any longer to fight for rich capitalists safe at home.
But most gave up because they saw the war was lost and that there was no cause worth dying for. As one German soldier wrote to his wife: “Things are quite beyond description here. If they get too hot for me, and if it can be managed in any way, I shall let myself be taken prisoner, for otherwise one will never get out of this mess… I am fed up at the thought of being bowled over after four years of it.”
This suggests that soldiers were prepared to risk their lives so long as there was a chance of success. As soon as that went, so too did morale. The interwar myth, that the German army was never defeated on the battlefield but stabbed in the back on the home front, is clearly false. The army collapsed before Germany slid into revolution, not after. But that didn’t stop unscrupulous nationalists, including the Nazis, using this lie to poison the politics of the Weimar Republic, to ease Hitler’s path to power and set the stage for another and even more terrible war.