Gathering the dead and wounded in no man's land

[Gabriel]

Hello

I have often wondered how the dead and wounded were gathered up from no man's land. Were there ever informal truces between the two sides which enabled the stretcher bearers to go into no man's land without being fired upon? Or did the two sides rely on collecting casualties in times of poor visibility such as at night or in periods of thick fog?

Thank you.

[ss002d6252]

Hello

I have often wondered how the dead and wounded were gathered up from no man's land. Were there ever informal truces between the two sides which enabled the stretcher bearers to go into no man's land without being fired upon? Or did the two sides rely on collecting casualties in times of poor visibility such as at night or in periods of thick fog?

Thank you.

Bodies and wounded would be collected in the dark but it wasn't unusual for both sides to allow collection of the dead and wounded, either by agreement or just by not shooting at those doing the collecting.

There was an element of common sense in allowing the collections as the bodies remaining in no-mans land were a hazard to yourself so you may as well let the enemy collect their own dead. I have seen reports from the Germans complaining about the number of British bodies they had to deal with, either by burial or by going out in to no-mans land and covering them with disinfectant.

Craig

[phil andrade]

In hundreds of thousands of cases- indeed, millions - the dead and wounded were not brought in ; they were left to rot and die where they lay.

Phil ( PJA)

[Knotty]

That's why they are still turning up even now, at a rate of approx 60 per annum

John

[Jim Strawbridge]

My grandfather saw action against the Turks. He was one who collected bodied from no-mansland and I understand that there were informal ceasefires to collect them. The fear was that decomposing bodies left in the hot sun would quickly cause typhoid and the like so this was a sensible arrangement. As the Turks and the British were collecting bodies at the same time my grandfather actually became friends with a Turk and exchanged souvenirs (watch for a belt).

[Colin W Taylor]

Jim,

There was an official truce with the Turks at ANZAC Cove to collect and bury the dead - rules and instructions were agreed to and recorded by both sides.

Kind regards

Colin

[sheldrake]

Hello

I have often wondered how the dead and wounded were gathered up from no man's land. Were there ever informal truces between the two sides which enabled the stretcher bearers to go into no man's land without being fired upon? Or did the two sides rely on collecting casualties in times of poor visibility such as at night or in periods of thick fog?

Thank you.

Sometimes there were truces. It wasn't easy to do. How do you communicate? Willa white flag be misunderstood - not least by someone to a flank on your own side? No side had any real control over artillery to their rear. Nor over potshots from armed heroes among the wounded which result in a wholesale massacre of the wounded. Its a miracle that there were any truces at all. On parts of the Somme on 1st July some German medical staff helped return wounded Brits to their side of no mans land.

Night was a better time to recover wounded. Part of the citation for Noel Chevasse's first VC is about recovering wounded near Guillemont from within 30 yards of the German lines - using a torch!

Less effort was spent recovering the dead, apart from, occasionally a beloved officer. It was enough to identify the dead. I suspect the Christmas Truce arose from using Christmas as an opportunity to clear no mans land. The dead from 17 NF in front of Theipval who died on 1st July were not identified or buried until mid October when the QM returned with a burial party.

[Khaki]

An identified recorded formal burial, was probably more the hope of the bereaved, those who died in hospital or in transit or were killed in the trenches and taken to a burial area in GS wagons were the likely candidates for decent burial but even there, no guarantees. For the rest especially in no mans land, being pushed into a shell hole or lightly covered with soil was the limited decency available, the remainder mostly destroyed for eternity and some to reemerge from the mud in the following decades to this day and beyond.

Burial of the NML dead was generally more of a hygiene expedient rather than a sentimental act, someone once said, "you can smell a battlefield, before you can see it"

khaki

[Nigel1898]

This is referred to in the book Surgeon with the Kaiser's Army by Stephan Westmann.

He states that in the parts of the front line where British troops were, an informal truce under a Red Cross flag was observed. However, the French reacted differently.

His words are that there was a difference between British gentlemen and French cavaliers.

[phil andrade]

The fighting on the Russian Front in the later summer of 1916 became extremely murderous in the marshes around Kowel.

This phase of the Brusilov Offensive was to go down in history as the " Kowel Massacres". I'm not sure if these were the Pripyat Marshes, or if the correct name was Kovel.

The local German commander refused the Russian suggestion of a truce to clear the field of dead- and, I suppose, the wounded .

He realised that it was so demoralising for the attacking Russians - who had been repeatedly repulsed by the Germans in this sector - to advance across a battlefield full of the putrefying bodies of their comrades, that it served his purposes to insist that the field should not be cleared.

It's interesting to note that - at about the same time - the situation was reversed on the Western Front. I allude here to Fromelles. On this occasion, of course, the Australians and British had been repulsed, and it was their dead who were left unburied. But the Germans were keen to advocate a truce for clearance : and it was the British who refused.

I wonder if this testifies to a difference of perception when it comes to how the foe was regarded : were the Russians seen as primitive and unworthy of the same amenities as the foe in the West ?

Another anecdote serves to remind us of how the Germans in the West were dismayed at the failure of the Allies to recover and bury the dead. This was in April 1918, when the Germans recaptured Passchendaele, and were, according to Ludendorff, confronted with the revolting spectacle of thousands and thousands of unburied dead from the previous autumn, two thirds of them in khaki.

I'm tempted to suggest that the static warfare on the Western Front imparted to the Germans - as the invaders and the occupying party - a greater incentive to keep things clean and tidy : they had a vested interest in the status quo. The Allies, on the other hand, saw anything which tended to consolidation and routine as acquiescence in the presence of the enemy on Franco Belgian soil. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but it might bear investigation.

Phil ( PJA)

[roel22]

I'm tempted to suggest that the static warfare on the Western Front imparted to the Germans - as the invaders and the occupying party - a greater incentive to keep things clean and tidy : they had a vested interest in the status quo. The Allies, on the other hand, saw anything which tended to consolidation and routine as acquiescence in the presence of the enemy on Franco Belgian soil. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but it might bear investigation.

Much like the theory why the British trenches were less "comfortable" than the German: the goal of the British commanders was to attack. Therefore the British soldiers wouldn't spend much time in the trenches anyway, so why bother.

Roel

[phil andrade]

Yes, exactly, thank you, Roel.

The expulsion of the enemy from home soil is hard to reconcile with construction of trenches designed for permanent occupancy.

A propos the recovery of dead and wounded from the field, I wonder how far Franco British commanders in the Great War were afflicted with what I allude to as "Cold Harbor Syndrome ".

Fifty years before the Great War, when the American Civil War was at the height of its intensity, there was a deadly series of positional battles in Virginia culminating in a particularly murderous repulse on 3 June 1864 at a place called Cold Harbor. Several thousand Northerners had been cut down in half an hour, by Southerners who were entrenched and able to inflict disproportionate slaughter .

The Northern commander was unwilling to permit a truce to recover the wounded, because by so doing he would have conceded defeat.

The resulting suffering and death of so many of his men who died between the lines was to be a portent for what was to happen in Europe fifty years later.

Fromelles comes to my mind.

Phil (PJA)

[kerry]

So can I take it that British wounded, say, in the Ypres Salient, were left to die assuming no loal truce could be arranged?

[Ken Lees]

3 hours ago, kerry said:

So can I take it that British wounded, say, in the Ypres Salient, were left to die assuming no loal truce could be arranged?

No.