GCSE - PAPER ONE.

This unit is Option Y - Britain in the First World War.


You should spend about 35 minutes on this question.

Study Sources A, B, C and D and then answer all parts of Question 10 which follow.

Source A: A crowd in Trafalgar Square London, at the outbreak of war in 1914.


Source B: A recruitment poster published in Britain in 1914.


Source C: A German description at the Battle of the Somme.

Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dug-outs and ran for the nearest shell craters. The machine guns were hurriedly put in position. A series of extended lines of British infantry was seen moving forward from the British trenches. They came on at a steady, easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front trenches.

From an account by a German soldier of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, 1916. It was written soon afterwards.

 

Source D: casualties on the Western Front.

After the Battle of the Marne in 1914 the generals had tried to continue the war of manoeuvre. The soldiers, striving gallantly to obey, found that it could not be done. Two new weapons of war - machine-guns and barbed-wire - prevented movement. The generals said that heavy artillery would be used to blow up the machine-guns and destroy the barbed wire. It didn't work.
Through 1916 and 1917 despair steadily grew. No one was controlling the war. It was controlling them, with unlimited, endless death.

From Fourteen Eighteen by John Masters, published in 1965. It consists of articles and photographs which appeared in a British newspaper in the summer of 1964, at the time of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.



Question 10.

 

(a) What does Source A tells us about how people felt towards the outbreak of war in 1914? (3 marks)

b) Source B shows a British recruitment poster published in 1914.
Use Source B and your own knowledge to explain why men in Britian volunteered for the army in 1914. (6 marks)

c) How useful is Source C for explaining why British casualties at the Battle of the Somme were so high?
Use Source C and your own knowledge to answer the question. (8 marks)

d) Is Source D a fair interpretation of why there were so many casualties in the First World War?
Use Source D and your own knowledge to answer the question. (8 marks)