Peter MacDonald
The 1917 Étaples mutiny, long suppressed in official accounts of WWI, was far more significant than the British state has ever publicly acknowledged. Étaples was a transition depot near the French coast, miles from the front lines, that held at peak times up to 80,000 soldiers. The mutiny erupted at this notorious Étaples base camp in northern France, a place feared and hated by soldiers across the Western Front.
The uprising exposed a collapsing system of military discipline that bordered on sadism, especially toward working-class soldiers who made up the bulk of Britain’s fighting force. It was here that the myth of the obedient Tommy unravelled.
The first to rise were soldiers of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade (NZRB), hardened colonial men who had already seen brutal fighting at Gallipoli and across the Western Front. They refused to submit to the dehumanising treatment meted out by the hated ‘Red Caps’, the military police known as ‘canaries’ for their yellow armbands. These enforcers were dubbed ‘trench dodgers’ and were handpicked for their cruelty. Empowered by the command structure, they operated with near total impunity, not just enforcing discipline, but deliberately breaking men’s spirits.
Conditions at Étaples were appalling. Recruits, many just weeks out of civilian life or returning to duty from wounds, and units rotating in and out of the front lines, all had to train continuously, if not on leave or work parties, and they were brutalised by training staff and harassed by Red Caps until going to the front became a form of relief. This was no accident: it was policy. Whitehall feared mass desertion, especially as a shadow army of deserters estimated at up to 100,000 across nationalities was already living rough in the old sectors of the front. These men raided supply dumps, survived off-grid in no-man’s-land and operated as a ghost force beyond the command of any government.
The flashpoint came when a Scottish soldier was shot dead by military police. Word spread quickly and the New Zealand Rifle Brigade led the response. What followed was not mindless chaos: it was an explosion of long suppressed rage. Thousands of soldiers rose up. Accommodation huts and tents were burned, the camp was set alight and administrative staff fled in terror. Red Caps were attacked and, in some cases, summary justice was meted out as some were fatally dealt with. Étaples township, itself, fell to the rioters. For several days, the revolt brought the entire command structure to the brink of collapse.
The Red Caps weren’t there to protect: they were there to instill fear. They operated not at the front, but behind the lines, with revolvers already drawn and tasked with shooting any soldier who faltered. This wasn’t military cohesion. It was internal terror and the system had been deliberately designed this way. After the French mutinies of 1917, when entire battalions had rebelled, some units were deliberately driven into no-man’s-land and cut down by their own artillery as punishment. The British command learned well: discipline at all costs, even if it meant turning guns on their own.
Veteran Harry Patch who died in 2009 aged 111, dubbed by tabloids as “Britain’s Last Tommy” tore the lid off this truth in a rare televised interview. His words were plain, unvarnished, and undeniable.
They said to us, ‘If you don’t go over, we’ll shoot you.’
Patch described how some Red Caps didn’t even wear their pistols on their hips they carried them drawn. Their job was not to inspire courage, but to enforce obedience with deadly force. It wasn’t shouted in the chaos of battle: it was calmly spoken, gun in hand.
If you stood up, you were killed. If you tried to go back, the military police would finish you off.
When Patch’s turn came in the third wave, he didn’t run. He crawled over the top on his belly and kept crawling forward.
That was the only way to survive.
This wasn’t heroism: it was survival in a system that treated men as expendable. The system wasn’t broken. It was designed that way.
And when that system came under threat from men who refused to be cowed, it responded as it always had: with silence, distortion and bullets.
To this day, the full extent of the Étaples mutiny, the French army rebellions and the vast underground world of wartime desertion remains one of the most suppressed chapters in British military history.
The truth, still buried under sealed archives and national myth, is this: the Étaples uprising was a genuine working-class rebellion against a war that had become a meat grinder.
The government’s silence since is no accident and the truth remains dangerous, challenging the myth of noble sacrifice and revealing the machinery of systemic murder that led directly into the horrors of World War II.
