ABSTRACT
The past, of course, is not necessarily a guide to the future. So the fact that Gerald Howard-Smith and his fellow officers managed to maintain their class privileges while training in England does not mean that they would be able to do so when the Battalion finished its preparations, moved to France and was sent to the frontline. Indeed, there are good reasons for supposing that they would find it extremely difficult to do so. Whatever the strength of Gerald’s and his colleagues’ class awareness, class isolation and sense of class superiority, they were bound to disintegrate, one would have thought, amid the carnage of war. Once at the front, the members of the Battalion would surely all be in it together, would surely all be confronted, whoever they were, by the misery, the indignities, the horrors of trench warfare. It has been suggested, after all, that one of the few redeeming features of
the First World War was its loosening of social barriers. ‘During the war years’, explains Gary Sheffield, ‘there was much talk among civilians about the positive effects of war service on social cohesion. In 1916 the Bishop of London spoke of a “brotherhood” being “forged of blood and iron” in the trenches, which should be maintained into peacetime thus ending the class war between “Hoxton” and “Belgravia”.’1
