Basil eventually enlisted on March 30, 1916. As a Private, he trained at Richmond Park, just outside of London. Rathbone then applied for a commission, so was therefore sent to an officers training camp at Gailes in Scotland. After his training, Rathbone received his commission and became a Second Lieutenant in the Liverpool Scottish Regiment. He wrote, "Here again luck was with me, but this time not of my wangling! The Liverpool Scottish, Second Battalion, was attached to the Fifty-seventh Division, a division which for reasons best known to the War Office was held in England for several months."³ This gave Rathbone a reprieve from facing the horrors of the Western Front.

In February 1917 Basil Rathbone contracted measles. The authors of Famous: 1914-1918 wrote, "After a week in a military hospital he was sent home to 24 Hendrick Avenue, close to Wandsworth Common in London. Here he shared the house with his brother John."⁴ John was still recovering from the wounds he received the previous July. He had been shot through the chest and right lung. "As soon as Basil was better, he returned to the depot and trained with the men under his command. He soon felt thoroughly adjusted to army life and, two months later, was finally sent abroad to join his battalion, the 2/10 Bn King's Liverpool Regiment, in the trenches near Bois-Grenier. On 23 May 1917, the unit's War Diary refers to the battalion being in billets. It also notes that a 2nd Lt P St J Rathbone had reported for duty and duly posted to B Company."⁵ 

Life on the front was like hell on earth. Soldiers on both sides in the war dug trenches to protect themselves from the machine-gun fire and artillery. The trenches gave the soldiers a shelter in which to eat meals and rest. As the armies fought, they worked their way north, toward the sea, and they were closer to the low countries, where the ground is lower than sea level. Consequently, the trenches they dug there were easily flooded. 

British trench near the Albert-Bapaume road at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme (photo by Ernest Brooks)

Lt. Basil Rathbone

The area in between the German trenches and the British trenches was called No Man's Land. Completely exposed, soldiers were forced to cross No Man's Land in order to advance. It was extremely dangerous and slow going due to barbed wire, land mines and machine-gun fire from the enemy trench. In addition, the ground was often littered with the bodies of soldiers who were killed.

The British soldiers typically spent about a week or two living in the trenches, and fighting on the front line. Then another unit would replace them on the front line, and the first unit would go "out of the line" to spend a week or so resting in a nearby village. This brief rest period gave the soldiers an opportunity to eat regular meals and get regular sleep so they'd be ready for another round of fighting.  

In August 2012 Frank B in the United Kingdom revealed on The Baz the contents of two letters that appear to have been written by Basil Rathbone. In the following letter, which Basil wrote to his family in 1917, he mentioned listening to the song "Roses of Picardy." Listen to the song as you read Basil's letter, and imagine his situation:

Sunday 15th Dear all, Bea’s letter arrived this morning, and so also did letters from uncle Harold and other family and a parcel from aunt Elfrida which looked very promising but proved to contain nothing but woollen underwear of such gigantic proportions I am at a loss for words. We have managed to fit three men inside a single pair. I wonder if this is the intention. You must enquire politely and also discover if auntie E made them herself. I think they will make excellent tents. Do not tell her that. We are going out of the line tomorrow, praise the lord, which means we will be able to change our clothes, wash and get some decent food and proper sleep, but it would be very fine to get some good whisky sent out before we are back again. I can’t say for sure how long we will be out, so if you could cut along and send it soon, and also some decent cigarettes, I should be eternally in your debt. It is the Park Lane of accommodation here, the best in all the Sector and we shall be sad to leave it indeed. Even the rats wear little dress suits and have impeccable manners. And we have a gramophone, though only one thing to play on it, which is Mr Pike singing “Roses of Picardy” – it has lost much of its original charm by this time and I think we would most of us cheerfully lob the thing into No Man’s Land if only we could get it away from its owner. But he is wise to us and never lets it long out of his sight, damn him. There is chronically little of interest to report as ever, and the state of tedium we exist in can best be illustrated by telling you the captain was sent a beef and onion pie by his people about a week ago, and it is still a topic of excited conversation for us. Otherwise — we kill rats. And lice. Or play cards. Or take rifle inspections or censor letters or write our own letters home. Fritz has been paying this sector a fair bit of attention for the last day or so. Mostly minenwerfers and field artillery but occasionally we get one of the really big blighters. There’ll be a terrific whistle and rush and thump somewhere and the ground will shake and bits of the parapet will fall on us. Terribly jolly. The heavy stuff mostly fall on the reserves, which of course means we are getting no food sent up and are living on rations and scraps and are fairly starving right now. Sleep is impossible day or night. As soon as we stand down at dusk there is endless movement and bustle of men on fatigues and supplies coming up the communication trenches and everyone is more jittery because we can’t see so every shadow becomes Fritz creeping up on us. Star shells are going up all night. Machine guns rattle now and then at nothing. Sometimes some unlucky blighter catches it by blind chance and the call for stretcher bearers goes up even though there’s not usually much to be done. After a few days of this one is so tired and stupefied one can fall asleep standing up on watch, and is really good for nothing, and so we are sent behind the lines to sleep and wash and eat hot food and be rested enough to do it all again. Oh but we had a real gas scare the other day. Our part in it was small but telling. It was very near to being an incident. I was out on duty and there were a few shells coming over, nothing much and mostly falling pretty deep, when one of the men said he heard the dread call ‘gas’ coming from north of us – We were all straining to catch anything unusual on the wind, but we couldn’t see or smell anything and we thought it was just imagination, until the CSM and I went along to the next traverse and we caught the smell of something sharp and acrid in the air, and we stopped dead and looked at one another, and I said ‘is it chlorine?’ and he said ‘I’m not taking the risk’ and he spun around and called out “gas” to the men and everyone began putting on respirators, and it was only then I realised my respirator was in the abri and not at my side, which was not a happy realisation. I’m afraid I took off and ran for it all the way back. Heroically of course. And that was it. The gas alarm proved unfounded you will be happy to know. This evening we are blessed for Fritz is being parsimonious with his gifts and the dear things in the kitchen have sent us a dixie full of hot, or at least not too cold, cocoa, to which we added our ration of rum . My sergeant has some chocolate saved and is sharing it with the men, so everything is excellently pleasant and we are sitting about playing rummy like a collection of old ladies in retirement. We are really as cosy as one can be in a hole in the ground full of mud and vermin and very unwashed human beings. I had a letter from Johnny the other day, saying he’s hoping to be back here soon. He surely can’t be well enough yet? I had thought he would be out of it for at least the rest of the year. He has scared us enough for the present and I shan’t enjoy worrying about him again. M also writes to say the baby is now saying many complicated words so she is quite sure he is a prodigy. He wasn’t saying very much at all when last I saw him, and was prodigious only in the amount he seemed prepared to eat, so this is an improvement. I believe William has caught a Blighty one? I’m hoping he will make a good recovery. Your loving scion PSB

"PSB" are Basil's initials: Philip St. John Basil. "Bea" is Basil's younger sister Beatrice. "M" (the next to last paragraph) refers to Basil's wife Marion; "the baby" is their son Rodion. "William" might refer to Basil's cousin, William Rathbone, or one of his father's cousins, also named William.

Even though Johnny was hoping to be able to return to the front "soon," he wasn't well enough. As Basil wrote in the letter above, he thought that Johnny would be out the rest of the year. Indeed he was. Captain John Rathbone returned to France in 1918. "His regiment, The Dorsets, was stationed close by, and he had leave to come over and spend the night with me," wrote Basil. "John and I spent a glorious day together. John had an infectious sense of humor and a personality that made friends for him wherever he went. In our Mess on that night he made himself as well-liked as in his own regiment. We retired late, full of good food and Scotch whiskey. We shared my bed and were soon sound asleep. It was still dark when I awakened from a nightmare. I had just seen John killed. I lit the candle beside my bed and held it to my brother's face—for some moments I could not persuade myself that he was not indeed dead. At last I heard his regular gentle breathing. I kissed him and blew out the candle and lay back on my pillow again. But further sleep was impossible. A tremulous premonition haunted me—a premonition which even the dawn failed to dispel."⁶

A few weeks later, Basil had another premonition. It was one o'clock on June 4, 1918, wrote Basil, and "suddenly I thought of John, and for some inexplicable reason I wanted to cry, and did."⁷ Basil later learned that his brother was killed on June 4 at exactly one o'clock. John Rathbone was buried at Berles New Military Cemetery in Pas de Calais, France.

In 1915 Rupert Brooke's poem "The Soldier" was published; it inspired thousands of British soldiers, including Basil Rathbone:

As if John's death wasn't hard enough for Basil to take, he had also lost his mother. She died in 1917.

In 1918 Basil wrote the following heartbreaking letter:

The date of the letter above is significant. On July 26th Rathbone and his men were in the trenches near the village of Festubert. For these daytime sorties into No Man's Land camouflage suits had been made to disguise the men to resemble trees. "On our heads we wore wreaths of freshly plucked foliage; our faces and hands were blackened with burnt cork. About 5:00 a.m. we crawled through our wire and lay up in no-man's-land. All sentries had been alerted to our movements. The German trenches were some two hundred yards distant."⁸ Two other men went with Rathbone on July 26: Corporal Norman Tanner and Private Richard Burton.

In an interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1957, Rathbone related the story of how he disguised himself as a tree to get near the enemy camp to obtain information. Here's a clip from that interview:

From the interview with Edward R. Murrow: "I went to my commanding officer and I said that I thought we'd get a great deal more information from the enemy if we didn't fool around in the dark so much . . . and I asked him whether I could go out in daylight. I think he thought we were a little crazy. . . .  I said we'd go out camouflaged—made up as trees—with branches sticking out of our heads and arms . . . . We brought back an awful lot of information, and a few prisoners, too."

In this interview Rathbone downplayed how dangerous the mission was. The team had to crawl ever so slowly across No Man's Land. If the Germans had seen moving "trees," the men would have been shot on sight. After about an hour, they reached the German front line. They cut through the barbed wire and slowly made their way along a trench that appeared deserted. "Suddenly there were footsteps and a German soldier came into view behind the next traverse. He stopped suddenly, struck dumb, no doubt, by our strange appearance. Capturing him was out of the question; we were too far away from home. But before he could pull himself together and spread the alarm, I shot him twice with my revolver—he fell dead. Tanner tore the identification tags off his uniform and I rifled his pockets, stuffing a diary and some papers into my camouflage suit. . . . Now things happened fast. There were sounds of movement on both sides of us, so we scaled the parapet, forced our way through the barbed wire—I have the scars on my right leg to this day—and ran for the nearest shell hole. We had hardly reached it when two machine guns opened a cross fire on us. We lay on the near lip of the crater, which was so close to their lines that it gave us cover. The machine-gun bullets pitted the rear of the crater."⁹ The three men split up, running in opposite directions from one shell hole to the next until they reached the British line. It was a miracle that they survived.

Rathbone's commanding officer sent reports to the war office praising the daylight patrols led by Lieutenant Rathbone. On September 9, 1918, Basil Rathbone was awarded the Military Cross for bravery.

The newspaper report of Rathbone's bravery and Military Cross award.

A military cross bearing the insignia of King George VI. The one awarded to Basil Rathbone would have looked just like this one.

After the armistice between the Allies and Germany was signed on November 11, 1918, the troops began to return home. Basil Rathbone came back to his wife and child, and his career, but he felt quite lost. The two years of horror that Basil lived through, knowing that each day could be his last, robbed him of any concern about the future.

In an interview for Photoplay magazine, Basil said, “I had come back from the war, where life had been like a long, terrible dream. At the front I had never thought about what would happen or why. There was no past and no future. Nights were either wet nights or dry nights. The important things to me were whether my billet was warm or cold, the food good or rotten. I suppose when you meet death daily for a long time you give up trying to order things. I came out of the war comparatively untouched. That is, I wasn’t shell-shocked or scarred up. But I had lost all sense of life’s realities. I found I was still a good enough actor. I got some good parts in London. Whatever they offered me, I took. Money meant nothing to me. I never thought of getting ahead. I never cared about it. Somehow I expected to be taken care of – as I had been in the army. I shrank from decisions. I never went after things I wanted. I hated any sort of battle or argument. I just wanted to be let alone – to vegetate. I was completely negative.”¹⁰

Although Basil stated that he wasn't shell-shocked, he may have affected more than he cared to admit. The anger that he clearly felt after the death of his brother and the aimlessness and lack of ambition with regard to his acting career are typical indications of post-traumatic stress disorder. The first world war was such a horror that it's a wonder any men came through it unscathed. Rathbone was a changed man, and his marriage suffered. Basil and Marion separated in August 1919.

In a 1940 interview for Modern Screen, Basil was asked what constituted real horror to him. His immediate reply was "War! . . . Going into an attack, paralyzed with fear, knowing that if we had our own free will, not a living man of us would go! Every living man of us would funk it. We go because we cease to be individuals. We become a mass machine. We are dominated by mass psychology. We become a composite Thing of arms, legs, heads and wills. We move into the attack only because it is the only way out. If we do not go into the attack, if we turn back one quivering inch, we are sot down like dogs – deserters. So we are forced to go forward, not because we are brave and gallant gentlemen, but because we are in a trap. War is a trap, a monstrous, gigantic, inconceivably barbarous trap. And there you have it. A trap is the most horrible thing in the world. Any kind of a trap. Because in a trap you are alone, crouched there with fear. There is Death screaming at you in front. There is Death sticking his tongue out at you from behind. . . . In the trap a man, no longer a man, lives with Death. There is no horror like it!"¹¹

Two photos of the Liverpool Scottish, taken near Hooge on June 16, 1915

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Notes:

1 In and Out of Character, by Basil Rathbone (Doubleday, 1962) p 11-12

2 Bravest of Hearts: The Biography of a Battalion—The Liverpool Scottish in the Great War, by Harold Giblin (Winordie Publications, 2000) p. 287

3  In and Out of Character, p. 14

4 Famous: 1914-1918, by Richard van Emden and Victor Piuk (Pen and Sword, March 2010) p. 157

5 Famous: 1914-1918,  p. 157

6 In and Out of Character, p. 8

7 In and Out of Character, p. 8

8 In and Out of Character, p. 3

9 In and Out of Character, p. 4

10 "Love Life of a Villain," Photoplay, August 1938.

11 "Horror Men Talk about Horror," Modern Screen, January 1940.

See also "A Multimedia History of World War One":  www.firstworldwar.com