A ‘mere six weeks’? A comparative study re-examining the longevity of infantry officers’ frontline service during the Great War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Veteran testimony after the Great War and current popular legend states that regimental officers in frontline infantry battalions during the Great War served around six weeks before death or injury ended their service. This article seeks to explore the veracity of these assertions by conducting a quantitative statistical survey of the longevity of officers who served in eight British and two Canadian infantry battalions on the Western Front during the Great War. The data presented in this study debunks the idea of the ‘six weeks’ myth as only 7 per cent of all episodes of service were six weeks or less. During 1914/1915, officers served on average just over five months, and this nearly doubled by 1918. Even during the intensive fighting of the Hundred Days in 1918, officers’ length of service was found to be longer than in earlier in the war. The increasing longevity of officer service over the course of the war may have been as a result of cumulative battlefield learning, support from experienced non-commissioned officers, the introduction of the left-out-of-battle system and tactical reform of platoons that made the platoon officer a co-ordinator rather than a personal leader. In addition, from 1916, the majority of officers joining infantry units under study were commissioned from the ranks and brought with them years of battlefield experience and military service which helped them survive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".