Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

(#litres_trial_promo) About 200 per 1,000 infants failed to survive the first year of life in many of Britain’s large industrial towns, and many that did grew up with hollow chests and rickety limbs. Overall, 60 percent of volunteers for the Boer War had been rejected as physically unfit, and even in 1918, when military medical standards were at rock bottom, over a million men were graded unfit for front-line service.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was a close correlation between social class and physical fitness. A pre-war survey of Cambridge undergraduates found 70 percent in the fittest group, Class I; 20 percent in Grade II, 7.5 percent in Grade III and just 2.5 percent in Grade IV. But in Britain as a whole in 1917 only 34 percent of recruits examined were actually Grade I, and those from urban areas with high infant mortality rates fared even worse.

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Thomas Atkins was no stranger to death. His siblings died in infancy from illnesses which would now be prevented by vaccination or cured by antibiotics. His workmates perished from a variety of accidents and diseases, and the prevalence of infection meant that even a simple cut could prove fatal. Most people then died at home, and in many households bodies were laid out in open coffins before burial. Funerals were rituals of enormous significance, for they said much about the status of the bereaved family and, by extension, of the neighbourhood.

The cut of the mourning clothes and of the funeral baked meats, the number of mutes and the number of plumes, the wreaths – who sent them and how much they cost: all the details evoke families anxious to provide as impressive a display as possible, and neighbours determined to see that they did.

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Most working-class families paid into burial and sick clubs, the latter to ensure a basic income if the breadwinner fell ill, and the former to avert the crowning insult of a pauper’s funeral.

Although most working-class communities generated a powerful sense of identity and shared values, they were by no means as crime-free as they appear in rosy retrospect. Drunkenness and its frequent concomitant wife-beating were common, and there was frequent violence, often on a small scale but sometimes, especially in Glagsow, where Catholic versus Protestant riots occurred, on a much larger scale. Even the small Hampshire brewery town of Alton (where I spent my middle years) was once so violent that policemen patrolled in pairs. The police were widely unpopular, and at least one of the reasons for widespread suspicion of the Military Police amongst First World War soldiers was an attitude forged in civilian life.

There were urgent political issues too. Lloyd George’s radical ‘Peoples’ Budget’ of 1906, which raised taxes to pay for social reforms, including old age pensions, had been passed at the cost of confrontation with the Lords, whose powers were reduced by the 1911 Parliament Act. Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women risked death for their beliefs. The apparent imminence of Home Rule for Ireland encouraged thousands of Ulstermen to arm and drill, and the so-called Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 originated in the possibility that the army might be used to coerce the North when Home Rule was granted. In June 1914 David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer (and as unreliable a prophet of the future as he was to prove a commentator on the past), assured London’s business leaders that the international skies had never been bluer. The government was far more concerned about domestic issues, and there seemed little doubt that it was right.

The Old Army mirrored this divided world. It had never been the mass army that French or German conscripts would have recognised, with middle-class men serving in rank and file alongside industrial workers or farm labourers. French infantryman Henri Barbusse tells us how:

Schoolteachers are rifle company NCOs or medical orderlies. In the Regiment, a Marist friar is a sergeant in the medical section; a tenor, the major’s cyclist; a lawyer, the colonel’s secretary; a landlord, mess-corporal in headquarter company.

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Stephen Westmann, a German medical student called up in 1914, described his own army as:

a kind of mixing bowl, where young men from all classes of the population met and had to adjust themselves to an extremely rigid discipline. The aim was to create a team spirit; of course, there were square pegs who did not or would not fit into round holes and who let their side down.

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In addition to being polarised by class, the British army was small. In August 1914 it had 247,432 regular officers and men against an authorised establishment of 256,798. The army reserve, ex-regulars who had completed their service but were liable to recall in the event of war, numbered 145,347. The Special Reserve, whose members had carried out six months’ full-time training, topped up with two weeks a year, was 63,933 strong, and the Territorial Force had 268,777 officers and men against a theoretical strength of 316,094. The grand total, including the Channel Islands Militias and the Bermuda and Isle of Man Volunteers, was 733,514

(#litres_trial_promo) – tiny by the standards of Britain’s allies and opponents alike. Germany had a standing army of 700,000 men in peacetime, inflated to 3.8 million on mobilisation, and French figures (in her case swollen by colonial troops) were roughly comparable. The French and German armies would receive regular reinforcements as successive classes of conscripts came of age; both were used to training and equipping men on a large scale, and had thought (though their conclusions were different) about how best to integrate reservists and regulars.

They were, in short, armies which reflected the societies from which they sprang, and were geared to continental war. The British army did neither of these things. While British generals of the war have been subjected to persistent critical attention, some justified and some not, the politicians who both supported a military rapprochement with France, likely to produce British involvement in a major war, and maintained exactly the sort of army suited to wage small wars rather than large ones have been let off more lightly. Osbert Sitwell, aesthete and foot guards officer, was inclined to be less forgiving. ‘Even today you see references to the immense achievements of the Liberal administration of 1906–14,’ he wrote,

but can any government whose policy entails such a lack of preparation for war as to make that seeming solution of difficulties a gamble apparently worthwhile for an enemy, and this leads to the death or disablement of two million fellow-countrymen … Can any government which introduces old age pensions, so as ‘to help the old people’ and then allows half the manhood of the country to be slaughtered or disabled before it reaches thirty years of age, be considered to have been either benevolent or efficient?

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The BEF of 1914 was sired by the Boer War out of the redcoat army that Wellington would have recognised. After peaking at around a quarter of a million men in the year of Waterloo, the army had settled down to an annual strength of around 180,000 men, about a third of them stationed in India. The purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, branding was also abolished that year and flogging (except in military prisons) in 1881. Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War 1868–75, embarked upon a series of reforms which were completed by his successor. To boost recruiting, perennially sticky in peacetime, enhance the status of the soldier in society, and create a system which would link battalions serving abroad with their training and recruiting bases in the United Kingdom, the old numbered regiments of the line, with loose regional affiliations, were combined into county regiments.

The first twenty-five line infantry regiments already had two regular battalions and were left untouched: the remainder were amalgamated. Usually the marriages were logical, if not always happy: the 37th (North Hampshire) was amalgamated with the 67th (South Hampshire) to form the Hampshire Regiment, and the 28th (North Gloucestershire) was a logical bedfellow for the 61st (South Gloucestershire). There were some ruffled tartans elsewhere: the 73rd (Highland) was swallowed by the 42nd (Royal Highland) in the Black Watch, and the 75th (Stirlingshire) was devoured by the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders). We cannot be quite sure what the 99th (The Prince of Wales’s Tipperary Regiment) made of its amalgamation with the 62nd (Wiltshire) to form the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment, but we can guess. Depots, many of them red-brick pseudo-keeps, sprang up in many towns. Le Marchant Barracks in Devizes, named after a hero of Salamanca, housed the Wiltshires; Brock Barracks in Reading, commemorating Sir Isaac Brock, who brought some much-needed lustre to the War of 1812, accommodated the Berkshires, and Roussillon Barracks in Chichester, named after a French regiment whose plumes had allegedly been captured at Quebec, was the Royal Sussex depot.

Cardwell’s army with its linked battalions, one at home and one abroad, was optimised for Queen Victoria’s little wars. It was less well suited for a long war against the Boers. There were too few regulars, and although that hardy perennial, a combination of patriotic sentiment and local economic recession, encouraged tens of thousands of young men to volunteer, the performance of some war-raised units was patchy. Kipling wrote of:

Cook’s son, Duke’s son,

Son of a belted Earl,

Forty thousand horse and foot

Going to Table Bay …

The reality was less splendid. Wags quipped that the brass IY shoulder-title worn by the Imperial Yeomanry really stood for ‘I Yield’, and the lugubrious ditty ‘The Boers have got my Daddy’ became all too popular in music halls. It is probably true to say that neither the German nor the French armies, many of whose officers gained a good deal of pleasure from watching the lion’s tail getting twisted, would have done much better, and the eventual British victory owed much to the experience of colonial campaigning elsewhere. But it was clear that the army required thoroughgoing reform. It had been compelled to field almost 450,000 men to win, losing 5,774 killed in action and 16,168 to disease or wounds.

Reforms, however, were sporadic. In the immediate aftermath of the Boer War Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the commander in chief, pressed ahead with the development of the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and the quick-firing artillery which the army was to take to war in 1914, giving a crucial impetus to marksmanship training. But William St John Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War, had a rougher ride. He had a grandiose scheme for a substantial increase in the size of the army, but his Cabinet colleagues would not allow him to consider conscription in order to sustain this new force and it became clear that voluntary recruitment would not meet its needs. Brodrick departed, his only legacy the bitterly-unpopular peakless cap which bore his name. ‘We thoroughly detested this new cap,’ recalled Frank Richards,

which the majority of men said made them look like bloody German sailors, but we much preferred it to the poked cap which followed it … When this cap first appeared the men said that the War Office was being run from Potsdam. They were rotten caps to carry in a man’s haversack.

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Brodrick was replaced by Mark Arnold-Forster. He initially hoped to save money by sharply reducing volunteer and auxiliary forces (how history repeats itself), but was seen off by opponents in both Houses, and although he had more success with his ‘New Army Scheme’, based on a mix of long and short service, the Conservative government fell before substantial changes could be made.

Yet the period was by no means sterile. Although the report of the Royal Commission on the South African War was delivered in 1903 at the time of a political crisis which limited its impact, Lord Esher, one of its members and a close associate of the king, had chaired a small committee which made several useful proposals. Amongst them were the strengthening of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the addition of a permanent secretariat; the restructuring of the army’s command structure by the abolition of the post of commander in chief and the creation of an Army Council with a chief of the general staff as its professional head with the adjutant general, quartermaster general, master general of the ordnance, permanent under secretary and financial secretary as its members. The three main branches of the general staff were created – the directorates of Army Training, Staff Duties and Military Operations. Indeed, the general staff thus created remains recognisable at the time of writing.

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R. B. Haldane, Secretary of State in Asquith’s Liberal Cabinet, was a German-educated lawyer who brought formidable intellectual gifts to his task. At the first meeting of the Army Council after taking office, Haldane was asked what sort of army he envisaged. ‘An Hegelian army,’ was his reply, and with that, he observed, the ‘conversation rather fell off. Indeed, there was a philosophical logic to his scheme. He hoped to create a genuinely national army, with its regulars constituting ‘a sharp point of finely tempered steel’, its Special Reserve providing immediate back up, and the Territorial Force furnishing a basis for expansion and support. Haldane was lucky in several respects. His government could expect to run a full term, so time was not pressing; he chose as his military advisers Gerald Ellison and Douglas Haig, who had a very good grasp of organisational politics; and the Esher reforms were already beginning to bear fruit.

Although Haldane later argued that his reforms were overshadowed by his knowledge of the Anglo-French staff talks, the instrument he created was not forged with a specific purpose in view, but was simply the best he could do within his reduced budget. It would consist of two distinct entities: a regular element, geared to producing an expeditionary force of six infantry divisions and a cavalry division, and a part-time Territorial Force, formed by combining the various militia, volunteer and auxiliary forces, which would take responsibility for home defence, thereby freeing up the regulars for foreign service. He reverted to the Cardwell terms of enlistment, seven or eight years’ service with the colours and four or five on the reserve. Haldane’s reforms did not please everyone, and the National Service League loudly proclaimed that nothing but compulsory service would do. Such a step was politically unacceptable to what was, at least by the standards of the age, a left-leaning Cabinet, and Haldane had done the best he could within his constraints.

Wellington would have recognised the regular army that emerged from Haldane’s reforms because, in many key respects, it had changed little since his day. The majority of men who enlisted as private soldiers were unemployed when they joined, and few even laid claim to a trade on their enlistment papers. One 1913 recruit admitted frankly that it was ‘unemployment and the need for food’ that encouraged him to join. John Cusack enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry when he was fourteen, telling the recruiting sergeant he was eighteen: urchins shouted ‘beef and a tanner a day’ as the recruits marched past, suggesting that that was why they had joined the army.

(#litres_trial_promo) His mother reclaimed him and took him home, but three weeks later he signed on again, this time in the Royal Scots Greys.

What is striking about those pre-war regulars who have left some record of their motives is just how many were attracted by more than a full belly and a good pair of boots. Herbert Wootton recalled that he was:

Very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars who had served through the South African War of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers.

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R. A. Lloyd ‘had always wanted to be a soldier, and a cavalryman at that’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Frank Richards grew up in the South Wales coalfield, and his cousin David joined the army during the miners’ strike of 1898. But despite ‘all the Socialist propaganda’ he was ‘a rank Imperialist at heart’, and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers because:

they had one battalion in China, taking part in the suppression of the Boxer Rising, and the other battalion in South Africa, and a long list of battle honours on their Colours, and … they were the only regiment in the Army privileged to wear the flash. The flash was a smart bunch of five black ribbons sewed in a fan shape in the back of the tunic collar, it was a relic of the days when soldiers wore their hair long, and tied up the end of the queue in a bag to prevent it from greasing their tunics.

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Uniform also helped attract R. G. Garrod. He was a junior clerk when he saw ‘a gorgeous figure in blue with yellow braid and clinking spurs and said to myself “that’s for me …”.’

(#litres_trial_promo) William Nicholson, whose grandfather had charged with the 13th Light Dragoons at Balaklava, ‘was attracted by the full-dress uniform of mounted regiments’, and joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1911.

(#litres_trial_promo) John Lucy and his brother Denis went ‘a bit wild’ after their mother’s death and duly joined up.

We were tired of landladies and mocked the meaning of the word. We were tired of fathers, of advice from relations, of bottled coffee essence, of school, of newspaper offices. The soft accents and slow movements of the small farmers who swarmed in the streets of our dull southern Irish town, the cattle, fowl, eggs, butter, bacon and the talk of politics filled us with loathing.

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