Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

But we had not seen the Guards. You never saw such a difference. In the first place the officers all looked like gentlemen, and the men twice the size, and in the second their discipline is extraordinary. Different altogether from other regulars. Not a man sits down as you pass, no matter how far off you may be.

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Soldiers from other regiments who failed to salute properly as the Guards Division passed on the march were arrested and taken with it. At the day’s end they were interviewed, had the error of their ways pointed out, and were invited to return whence they had come. Saluting improved for miles around. The Old Army’s discipline could survive stern shocks. In the chaos following the battle of Le Cateau in August 1914, Lieutenant Roland Brice Miller, a regular officer in 123rd Battery Royal Field Artillery, described how:

A private soldier of the Bedfordshire Regiment, grey with fatigue, approached me, came smartly to the slope [-arms] and slapped the butt of his rifle in salute. ‘Can you tell me a good position to retire to?’ he asked. One man!

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A battalion like 3/4th Queen’s or the Accrington Pals was perfectly capable of laying on a smart formal parade, and there was a latent dandyism in many soldiers that found military ritual perversely satisfying. But guardee smartness was not their concern, and their discipline continued to reflect pre-war relationships. Private Bewsher of the Accringtons remembered that his company sergeant major, revolver in hand, had checked the shelters in the front-line trench for laggards before the attack on 1 July. ‘He had no need to do that,’ complained Bewsher. ‘All the lads were ready to go.’

(#litres_trial_promo) And while the regulars accepted robust discipline as a matter of course, territorials and New Army men, far more conscious of what they had once been, and, God willing, would be once again, were far less prepared to tolerate its more extreme manifestations such as Field Punishment No. 1.

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Sergeant Jock Chrystal of the Northumberland Hussars, a Yeomanry (territorial cavalry) regiment, reproved by his RSM, told his officer that he resented the rebuke. ‘Now, Sor, did ye ivvor hear such cheek?’ he asked. ‘Him, Halliday, a Sergeant-Major jaist, an’ me, the Duke’s Forester, talkin’ to me that way?’

(#litres_trial_promo) It was not a remark which would have gone down well in the Grenadiers.

The different identities of regular, territorial and New Army units were blurred, though rarely wholly obscured, but casualties and the sheer caprice of battle meant that some units survived the war with their identity intact while others lost it relatively quickly. Captain James Dunn, that ‘doctor with a DSO, and much unmedalled merit’ who compiled the history of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, recorded his unit’s evolution as its regular content steadily diminished. In early 1915 there were still enough old sweats about to delight the corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, when he inspected the battalion: ‘He chatted and chaffed, pinched their arms and ears, asked how many children they had, asked if they could be doing with leave to get another … When it was over he said to the GOC, “That’s been a treat. That’s the sort we’ve known for thirty years.”’

(#litres_trial_promo) Dunn reckoned that the battalion then had about 250 originals left, mainly in transport, drums, signals and amongst the NCOs. But by the summer of 1918 he admitted ‘we were a regular battalion in name only’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This is scarcely surprising, for the battalion suffered 1,107 killed, and four times as many wounded, amongst its non-commissioned personnel during its four years on the Western Front, getting through the whole of its 1914 establishment strength five times over. It was actually luckier than the New Army 10/Royal Welch Fusiliers, which lost 756 soldiers killed in only two and a half years at the front.

The Royal Welch Fusilier regimental depot at Litherland held officers and men from the regular, territorial and New Army battalions of the regiment, who had come from hospitals, long courses or recruiting offices. As Second Lieutenant Lloyd Evans discovered in 1916:

They would be sifted and trained, and detailed singly or in batches to all fronts where Battalions of the Regiment were serving. In the huge mess were officers who had served with one or more of these battalions. There were ‘returned heroes’, so I thought of them, from the First and Second. Some struck me as being really heroic. Others were the talkative sort who worked to impress on ‘these Service Battalion fellows’ that ‘of course it was somewhat different in the Regular Battalions’.

He had mixed feelings about being posted to the 2nd Battalion because ‘it used up subalterns by the dozen’, but found himself very happy in it.

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During the process of drafting the Welsh content of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers seems to have increased. There had been a substantial Birmingham contingent in the pre-war battalion which led to outsiders, careless of their dentistry, calling it ‘The Brummagem Fusiliers’, and Captain Robert Graves recalled his CSM, a Birmingham man, giving a stern talking-to to a German prisoner caught with pornographic postcards in his pack. Dunn observed that a July 1917 draft comprising largely young South Wales Miners was ‘much the best that has come to us of two years’. Nonetheless, only 37 percent of the battalion was Welsh-born.

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A survey of another regular battalion, 2/Durham Light Infantry, makes the same point. It mobilised at Whittington Barracks, Lichfield, in 1914, and took 27 officers and 1,000 men to France. A single day that September cost it more men than the entire Boer War, and during the whole of the First World War it suffered 5,313 casualties, which included 30 officers and 1,306 men killed.

(#litres_trial_promo) The 2/Green Howards lost 1,442 officers and men killed in the war, 704 of them regulars, regular reservists or members of the Special Reserve. Of these experienced soldiers who were to be killed in the war just over half were killed in 1915, and over three-quarters had died by the end of that year.

(#litres_trial_promo) Ralph L. Mottram, driving across the Somme back area in 1916, ‘overtook an infantry regiment that bore my badge, and I looked in vain for any face I could recognise. But from out the ranks of the rear company rose a cheer, and I found that a few knew me. It was my own battalion, nearly all strangers …’.

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The pre-war regular infantryman who fought on the Somme was relatively uncommon, and the one who fought at Passchendaele was rarer still. But somehow battalions which the Army List described as regular did their best to behave like regulars. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor in the Second World War, was medical officer to 1/Royal Fusiliers in the First. He noticed how: ‘The battalion kept changing, seven colonels came and went and I could never school myself to grow indifferent to these gaps.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The battalion was sorely tried on the Somme, but as it came out of the line:

On the road we passed a Kitchener Battalion going up, they were resting by the roadside.

‘Them’s the First,’ one of them remarked, and the men hearing the words straightened up and covered off.

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The first three armies that fought on the Western Front – Old, New and Territorial – were founded on voluntary recruiting. No less than 5,704,416 men – about a quarter of the adult male population of the United Kingdom – passed through the army during the war. Just under half, 2,446,719, were volunteers, and the remainder were conscripted by one of a series of Military Service Acts. The first came into force on 27 January 1916 and the vice was progressively tightened as the war went on.

The conscript army had no separate identity. The majority of its soldiers were infantry: the infantry was easily the largest single arm on the Western Front, and suffered the highest casualty rate of any major branch of the army.

(#litres_trial_promo) Its soldiers were trained in the United Kingdom in battalions which, from the summer of 1916, steadily lost any genuine regimental identity: the 12th (Reserve) Battalion of the Welch Regiment became the 58th Training Reserve Battalion, the 230th (Graduated) Battalion and eventually the 51st (Graduated) Battalion of the South Wales Borderers.

(#litres_trial_promo) As we have already seen, soldiers were trained wearing one cap badge, and then rebadged, as the demands of the front required, in the infantry base depots at Etaples. The regional identity of units in the other three armies was steadily eroded also. This reduced the damage done to British communities which had been such a feature of the early stages of the Somme, but it deprived battalions of some of the bonds which had linked their members in the past.

It is not surprising that the decline of regional recruiting affronted members of the Old Army. Company Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of 1/Dorsets, as regimental as the proverbial button-stick, wrote on 21 August 1916:

In the evening a lot of our old hands now attached to 2nd Wilts (who are in billets just over the bridge) came to see us. They are terribly upset on account of having to serve with the Wilts (some of them are men slightly wounded on July 1st) and they went to see our Adjt to ask whether they could not come back to their own regiments. Adjt promised to apply for them, but it will be useless. Why the responsible authorities do these things I cannot imagine. If a certain Regt is required to be reinforced quickly and none of their own are available, the matter is explained. But we well know that after our smash on July 1st strong reinforcements were sent for us, and on arrival at the Base they were diverted, some to 2nd Wilts, some to Hampshires, etc., and we received men of Hampshires as reinforcements instead of our own. And so the merry game goes on. Some big pot is drawing a large salary for such muddling work as this, ruining the one thing which has kept our army going so well, i.e. ‘Pride of Regiment’, ‘Esprit de Corps’.

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The 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers had its losses in the fighting at High Wood on the Somme made up by 540 reinforcements, volunteers and conscripts, many ‘unlikely to stay the more exacting rigours of service in the field’. There were Cheshires, Shropshires and South Wales Borderers, who, as Captain James Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers wrote, ‘arrived restful of their transfer and resented by us’.

(#litres_trial_promo) An old soldier of 1/Black Watch, widely known as Black Jock, returned to his battalion after being wounded. He was soon posted as a deserter: it transpired that he had deserted from Etaples to get back to his battalion, fearing that he might be sent amongst strangers. And his battalion, knowing well that tartan was stronger than regulations, duly expunged the ‘crime’.

The war’s voracious appetite for infantry led to soldiers from other arms being compulsorily transferred. This led to difficulties because, for instance, well-qualified private soldiers in the Royal Engineers drew more pay than sergeants in the infantry. Sapper George Swinford records that in mid-1916:

I passed all my exams in sapping, mining, knots and lashings, demolitions and bridge building, and was waiting to go to the River Conway to do pontoon bridging which was the last thing. Then on Sunday morning notices were put up that every man in the camp was to be on parade at ten o’clock … away we all went to Kenmel Park where were attached to the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

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News that the sappers were entitled to extra pay unsurprisingly caused bad feelings amongst the infantry sergeants, ‘who said that they would make us earn it’. After large-scale collective absenteeism, which produced a week’s worth of trials, Private (as he now was) Swinford was rebadged again and sent to France, where he joined 11/South Lancashire, spending the rest of the war with that battalion.

Sometimes the process of assimilation was rough. Norman Gladden joined 7/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers on the Somme in September 1916. ‘To add to our discomforts,’ he recalled, The new draft was received by the battalion without ceremony or any sort of induction. We were absorbed by our company like bodies being sucked down into a morass and made to feel as if we had no rights at all.

Posted to 11/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers a year later when he returned to the front after being invalided home, he was much happier: the Lewis gunners he joined were ‘a likeable group, who made me feel at home straight away’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Often the new policy worked better than many old sweats would have expected. Men needed the sense of belonging, and battalions which took the trouble to make new arrivals feel welcome usually reaped the benefit. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Segrave, who commanded 1/15th London Regiment until promoted to command a brigade in August 1918, made a point of shaking hands with all new arrivals, regardless of rank, and left a first-rate battalion to his successor, Rowland Feilding, who immediately told his wife:

They are like little lions – these London men … The standard of courage among these London lads is so high that men who would be considered brave elsewhere do not seem particularly brave here.

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In contrast, Corporal Clifford de Boltz, posted to 1/Norfolk in France from 2/6th Norfolk, a cyclist battalion, found his draft ‘given some rations and told to lie in a field for the night’. They ‘gradually merged into the Regt.’

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We cannot even tell to which regiment Percy Smith was posted in 1917, but we do know that he was not happy when he arrived in France. On 18 September he told his family that: ‘if the relatives and wives of us boys knew the real state of affairs out here they would worry more and more and most likely there would be an unrest in the country’, and he prayed his brother Vic might be spared his fate. But he was proud of his battalion:

The Regiment I am in is a fighting Regt & we are always on the move we never stay at one place long, it was the first Regt out here when war was declared & we have some fine fellows. Fritz sure knows when we are about.