From 1914 to 1919 nearly three hundred men, including officers, were court-martialled for acts of gross indecency.

It is not the convictions themselves but how few there were when one considers how many men were serving in the British Army during the First World War; some three million soldiers. In 1918 a ban was introduced to stop active homosexuals being recruited into the ranks and which stood until the turn of the century.

How many men lie in unmarked graves with their lovers 'sleeping' next to them? And, indeed, how many others survived, such as T E Lawrence, who were unable to come to terms with their mixed emotions uncovered by their wartime experiences. We will never, never know.

We will never know how many had same-sex relationships in the trenches, due to the heavy losses encountered but also due to that generation's homophobia or ignorance of sexual politics. Yet the Great War's legacy can be read by all those have eyes to see, because it is present still in the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and many, many others.

Wilfred Owen's death just days before the Armistice cemented his reputation, aided and abetted by the careful nurturing of his myth by his mother and several notable poets who edited his work in the years afterwards, including Cecil Day-Lewis, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon himself.

Owen encapsulates the contradictions of war. On the one hand, the legitimate murder of his fellow man - the enemy - and on the other the romantic attachment to men on his own side. One particular poem written in London some time in late 1915 recounts a meeting with a sailor travelling home on the same train:

Strong were his silken muscles hiddenly

As undercurrents where the waters smile.

And in the next verse:

His words were shapely, even as his lips,

And courtesy he used like any lord.

When the war started in 1914, this level of homoerotic feeling was allowed so long as it did not result in any physical entanglement. How often sex occurred between men will always be difficult to know but to the officers who had attended single-sex English public boarding schools with their philosophy of muscular Christianity, bad food and cold showers it must have simply been an extension of their alma maters. From the playing fields of Eton to the killing fields of France, however much they were damaged by the war they would, if they were lucky, return home and much more comfortable surroundings.

Unlike the officers, who had grown up in the claustrophobic worlds of Harrow and Charterhouse, many servicemen had come from the slums of the cities or the less than rural idylls of the countryside, where the bulk of the population still lived. Living in crowded conditions, and not acquainted with the strict morals laid down by their so-called betters in the big houses on the right side of town, sex with other men, who had no knowledge of the word homosexual, was something not out of the ordinary. Indeed, incest was not made illegal in Britain until 1903.

A hint of this other world inhabited by the men at the front is touched on by one of the songs of the time, 'Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major' by Art Noell and Don Pelosi:

Private Jones came in one night,

Full of cheer and very bright,

He'd been out all day upon the spree;

He bumped into Sergeant Smeck,

Put his arms around his neck,

And in his ear he whispered tenderly:

Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant Major…

A popular song of the time, eh? Although, the soldier is obviously drunk, it is far from condemning his behaviour, if at all. Why was this level of homoeroticism tolerated? Probably because their superiors had no choice, as the bodies mounted up as the warfare became – literally and metaphorically – more entrenched. Also, one only has to check the private lives of some of the top brass to suspect that was sauce for the gander…

Since the dawn of military history, same-sex relationships have been a feature – often a vital one – from the days of the Sacred Band of Thebes in Ancient Greece to the 'gay' regiments in the South African Defence Force in South Africa during apartheid. So it is not real shock to discover that one of the most familiar faces of the Great War, that glowered down on eager conscript or conscientious objector alike had deep emotional attachments himself, namely Horatio Kitchener.

Lord Kitchener of Khartoum became Secretary of War in 1914 and his face on the recruiting posters fast became an icon of the British Empire. His reputation rested on the fact that he had been in command of the force that had not only defeated the Mahdi, but also avenged the death of Gordon at Khartoum. Somehow he also managed to avoid the blemish of being involved in the Boer War, despite his employment of concentration camps. When he died abroad a cruiser bound for Russia, after hitting a mine, off the Orkney Islands, in June 1916, drowning with most of his staff, he died a hero of Empire. A hero he may have been in public, but in private his persona was somewhat different. A collector of fine china, who doted on his pet poodle, who was always surrounded by what he called his 'happy family of boys' or young, handsome unmarried officers. He was an avowed misogynist, although Queen Victoria disagreed. Needless to say, Lord Kitchener was a lifetime bachelor. Kitchener's aide-de-camp, Oswald Fitzgerald, he too was unmarried, also died on the HMS Hampshire. Their devotion to each other was well known to those in the know.

Of all the heroes of the First World War, one name stands head and shoulders above the rest: T E Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean's classic film has imprinted the legend of this daring British officer that united the disparate Arab tribes to defeat the Turks, into the hearts and minds of millions. Hollywood, unfortunately, does tend to gild the lily. Far from being a strapping blue-eyed, blond, six-footer, Lawrence was shorter, darker and slightly more effete in reality. He had ventured to the Middle East before the outbreak of the war and his reputation relies heavily on his book 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom', which was dedicated to Salim Ahmed, known to Lawrence as Dahoum. In the post-war aftermath, Lawrence tried to regain his anonymity, which was nigh on impossible. Wracked with guilt since a child, due to his illegitimacy and a strict religious upbringing, he would indulge in sessions with a young lad called Bruce in an effort to expunge his sense of unworthiness. His sense of failure was probably compounded by the post-war aftermath, a situation the world is still coming to grips with even now, but could also date back to an incident during the war itself. On 20 November 1917, disguised as a peasant, he entered Deraa in Syria to elicit advance intelligence on the enemy. He was subsequently arrested and tortured by the Turks and Lawrence's account makes for uneasy reading.

"He began to fawn on me, saying how white and fresh I was, how fine my hands and feet, and how he would let me off drills and duties, make me his orderly, even pay me wages, if I would love him."

Strangely, he was apparently allowed to escape, when one of the Turkish soldiers informs him, after a quite extensive beating, that a door in an adjacent room is unlocked. Was he hooked? Who knows? Lawrence died in 1935 in a fatal motorcycle crash. Of course, one man's guerilla fighter another man's terrorist, as the saying – slightly misquoted – might say. Whereas Lawrence was seen as a force for good, although some of his actions may now be considered war crimes and his own account of them rather open to the charge of falsification, his myth is pretty much enshrined in folk memory. What he did in his private life was, surely, his affair. For others, it became a matter of consequence.

In the same year that Kitchener went to a watery grave, another man went to the gallows. His name was Roger Casement, a former British consul, born in Ireland who had worked in several parts of Africa and South America. He had denounced atrocities amongst the rubber workers on those continents and had been knighted in 1911. However, his calls for social justice did not end there and he became enamoured of the Irish Republican cause. For his beliefs, he became a martyr of the Nationalist cause. He was tried, after he had been discovered trying to elicit German help to enable a free Ireland. The prosecution's use of his 'black' diaries, cataloguing his sexual encounters with men, certainly failed to help his defence but definitely to tighten the noose around his neck. The attendant hysteria surrounding the case fuelled the belief that a moral cancer was sweeping through society and the establishment – suitably alarmed – intensified their crackdown sending those men further into the closet. Only after years of pressure from the European Court of Human Rights and gay protest groups did the ban on active homosexuals in the British armed forces finally removed.

© Howard Watson 2008