Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

‘Never heard tell before of a marine who didn’t feel like fighting,’ said the marine, setting down his empty mug and jumping forwards like a boxing kangaroo.

In a moment we were all at it, hammer and tongs, and the sides being even, a decent bit of blood flowed: fortunately the scrap ended before murder was done, by the landlord shouting that the picket was on the way.

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The subject of women was just as contentious. The army began to build quarters for married soldiers and their families towards the end of the nineteenth century, but soldiers required permission to marry ‘on the strength’ and at the turn of the century had to have five years’ service and be twenty-six years of age before being considered. ‘A man who married off the strength,’ observed Frank Richards, ‘had to keep his wife on his own shilling a day; she lived outside barrack and he inside, and they met whenever they could, but officially she did not exist’.

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Single men in barracks, as Kipling accurately observed, did not grow into plaster saints, and, deprived of much chance of marriage, made other arrangements. Prostitutes thronged about in garrison towns, and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which vainly sought to control venereal disease by medical inspection and compulsory treatment, covered towns like Aldershot, Colchester and Woolwich in England and Cork in Ireland. Also included was the great military camp outside Dublin, the Curragh of Kildare, where girls and women known as ‘wrens’ lived rough outside the camp. Occasionally, when girls got into barracks, things got out of control; in 1896 soldiers of a Yorkshire regiment were involved in a gang rape, and three of them were sent to prison. There were more comfortable arrangements for officers, who could not be expected to rough it in huts out on the furze, and the future Edward VII was gently initiated into what became a life-long preoccupation at the Curragh in 1861.

(#litres_trial_promo) Regiments stationed in India maintained lal bazaars, essentially regimental brothels, and there were also many private establishments. Frank Richards recalled that ‘a magnificently built half-caste prostitute of fifty years of age’ decided to celebrate her retirement by giving:

free access to her body between the hours of 6pm and 11pm. Preference was given to old customers. She posted a notice to this effect on the door of her room and if I related how many men applied and were admitted and went away satisfied in those short hours, I should not be believed.

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Girlfriends were smuggled into barracks too. One of Richards’ corporals briefly kept a woman in his bunk, an arrangement which led to predictable difficulties over an alternative use to which one of the company’s tea buckets was put. The architects who designed the ornamental iron railings surrounding Cardwell barracks had inadvertently spaced them so widely that sexual commerce could comfortably be carried out between them.

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It is important that we do not follow the Duke of Wellington and believe that all regular soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink …’, however. There was a sprinkling of gentleman-rankers, who had joined for a variety of reasons and usually kept quiet about them. Sometimes there were tragedies that we can only guess at. In 1909 Private John Vivian Crowther of the 18th Hussars shot himself in barracks. He was described at his inquest as ‘a cultured and educated Oxford graduate who had inherited a large property’.

(#litres_trial_promo) John Lucy tells how:

There was a taciturn sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics … There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers.

And there were the properly ambitious. Lucy declared that: ‘Promotion … is my mark’ and was speedily made a lance corporal. He found that the first promotion was the hardest to bear, for he was at once separated from his comrades and for the new NCO ‘every order he has to give to an old friend is a pain’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Frank Richards decided that the price of promotion was too high, and obstinately declined it throughout his eight years with the colours and the whole of his wartime service. There were many like him: in 1918 young Frederick Hodges found himself in command of Private Pearson MM – ‘a short, sturdy little man … nearly twice my age’. Pearson had a long-running gag about the tinned pork and beans which were a common ration issue (‘I say, where is the pork?’). And he always called Hodges ‘Corp’.

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A hard-working regular soldier, who took his military training and army education seriously, might become a lance corporal in a year or two and corporal in three. He would be unlikely to make sergeant in his first enlistment – although promotion had speeded up during the Boer War – and the prospect of a third stripe and the more comfortable life of the sergeants’ mess was dangled out to persuade men to sign on after their first term. It was possible to get promoted from sergeant to colour sergeant (in the infantry) or staff sergeant (in other arms) and on to warrant officer in ten years, though this was fast work. King’s Regulations specifically guaranteed that warrant officers would be able to complete twelve years’ service, which entitled them to a small pension. Senior NCOs and warrant officers were likely to be able to complete twenty-one years’ service, increasing their pensions, as long as they remained fit, and could serve even longer with their commanding officer’s support. The Northamptons boasted a private soldier who had joined the regiment as a boy and died in harness just before the Boer War at the age of fifty-five. There were always jobs around the battalion which old soldiers like this could do: running the store which held the privately-purchased sports kit, helping break in recruits (‘Leave to fall out, trained soldier, please?’) and, of course, looking after the young gentlemen.

Most of the officers came from what Edward Spiers has called ‘the traditional sources of supply’, and even that arch-traditionalist the Duke of Wellington would have been struck by how little the officer corps of 1914 differed from that he had taken to Waterloo 101 years before. The peerage, gentry, military families, the clergy and the professions provided its bulk, with a minority coming from business, commercial and industrial families.

(#litres_trial_promo) In practice social divisions were more flexible than they might seem, with families who had made good in trade setting the seal on their gentility by buying land, marrying their daughters into the aristocracy and sending their sons into the army. Many a young man with a good education, crested signet ring and commission in a smart regiment was only two generations away from the shovel or the counting house.

Military families played as important a part in the army of 1914 as they had in Wellington’s: no less than 43.1 percent of the fathers of cadets entering Sandhurst in the summer intake of 1910 were ‘military professionals’. In the winter of 1917 this had sunk to 17.9 percent, but by the winter of 1930 it was an astonishing 62.4 percent.

(#litres_trial_promo) The future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, remembered that:

I never felt any special inclination to a military career, but it would have taken more independence of character than I possessed at the time, to avoid it. Nearly all my relations were military. I had been brought up among soldiers; and my father, while professing to give me complete liberty of choice, was determined that I should be a soldier. I had no particular bent towards any other profession, and I took the line of least resistance.

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Alan Brooke came from a long line of soldiers originating in Ulster, and initially wanted to be a doctor, but military blood was thicker than medical water, and off he went to Woolwich to become a gunner. It was as well for Britain’s conduct of the Second World War that he did, although even at the height of his powers the slight, bespectacled Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke had, perhaps, a touch of the consulting room to him.

Just as Wellington’s officer corps contained a good many young men whose only fortune was their sword, so too the army of 1914 had many officers who were just on the right side of the borders of gentility. This often made for an uncomfortable life, for although the purchase of commissions had been abolished a generation before, being an officer in the British army was an expensive business. In 1903 a War Office Committee reckoned that an officer needed a minimum of £160 a year in addition to his pay to be able to survive in the infantry. Life in the cavalry was more expensive, for a subaltern needed to provide himself with at least one charger and could hardly avoid hunting and playing polo: he could just scrape by with £300 a year, but the average private income of cavalry officers was £6–700. In 1912 Major General M. F. Rimington warned that it had once been possible to find rich young men to join the cavalry because they were not expected to work hard. But now they were expected to work till 1.00 or even 3.00 in the afternoon: who would pay to serve in the cavalry and have to work too?

(#litres_trial_promo) The Hutchinson Committee of 1905 was inclined to agree. It believed that many young men would like to join the cavalry if only they could afford it, and urged that the government should make it cheaper for young officers to maintain themselves in the cavalry by providing chargers and saddlery at public expense.

Alan Hanbury-Sparrow joined the Royal Berkshires in 1912 with just £175 a year, and found it hard going. In the following year E. G. W. Harrison survived in the Royal Artillery with only £18 a year which brought his total income to £92. ‘Mess bill without a drink or a cigarette [was] £6 monthly’, he wrote, ‘soldier servant and washing £1 monthly, so a penny bus fare was a matter of deep consideration’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Towards the other extreme, Osbert Sitwell’s father (advised by the wonderfully-named Major Archie Gowk) gave him £530 a year in 1912 as a Yeomanry officer attached to a regular cavalry regiment, but stressed that if young Osbert received any pay he would expect to be given it. But some officers survived despite the odds. William Robertson had joined the army as a private in 1877 despite his mother’s declaration that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat. He reached the rank of sergeant major before being commissioned, and managed to survive on his pay, though he acknowledges the kindness of his brother regimental warrant officers who clubbed together to buy him his saddlery. He became chief of the imperial general staff during the First World War, making the British army unique amongst allies and enemies in having as its professional head an officer commissioned from the ranks.

Officer training reflected old traditions. Officers destined for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, the ‘gentlemen of the Ordnance’, went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, known as ‘the shop’, which had trained them since the eighteenth century. Entry was by competitive examination: the young Alan Brooke sweated blood at an army crammer’s, eventually passing in to Woolwich 65th out of 72. The entrance exam included compulsory papers in English, French or German, and mathematics, and a choice of two papers from further mathematics, history, German, Latin, French and science. Those who passed out with the highest places in the final order of merit tended to go to the Royal Engineers, and the remainder to the Royal Artillery: in the December 1909 list numbers 1–11 became sappers and 12–36 gunners.

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Officers for the cavalry, infantry, Indian army and Army Service Corps went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which had existed since 1799, though it had not trained the majority of officers until after the abolition of purchase. Entrance to Sandhurst too was by competitive examination, and its final order of merit was no less important than that at Woolwich. Officers who hoped to go to the Indian army, where they could live on their pay, had to pass out towards its top. Young Bernard Montgomery (already under a cloud for setting fire to a fellow cadet’s shirt-tail) passed out too low to be admitted to the Indian army and joined the Royal Warwickshires instead. It is fashionable to decry the standards attained at Sandhurst: one scholar has observed that it was amazing what a young man did not have to know to get into the cavalry or artillery. However, anyone choosing to look at their examination papers would be struck by the fact that these were no brainless hearties.

While Woolwich trained 99 percent of artillery and engineer officers, Sandhurst trained only 67 percent of the officers destined for the infantry and cavalry. Some 2 percent were commissioned from the ranks. These were combatant commissions, whose holders would take rank and precedence alongside their comrades from public school, as opposed to the holders of quartermaster’s or riding master’s commissions, appointed to honorary commissions for specific jobs. Of the remainder, about half came from universities, where they had undertaken some training in the Senior Division of the Officers’ Training Corps: the Junior Division – ‘the Corps’ – comprised contingents in public schools. Most of the others had entered the army through ‘the militia back door’. Officers holding a commission in the militia or Yeomanry (or the Special Reserve or Yeomanry from 1908) could bypass Sandhurst altogether by taking a competitive examination for a direct commission. This was how Field Marshal Sir John French, who had started his career in the navy, had got into the army, and Henry Wilson, his deputy chief of staff in 1914, had followed the same route.

Rory Baynes, considering a military career, confessed that:

I much preferred the idea of sporting a militia officer’s magnificent uniform than that of going to Sandhurst, where in those days I would have had to spend almost two years in what was a rather strict public school atmosphere.

He was accordingly commissioned in 1906 into the 3rd Bedfordshire Militia, a ‘strange and exclusive crowd’: no experience was necessary, but the personal approval of the regiment’s colonel, the Duke of Bedford, certainly was. Young Baynes trained with his battalion, spent some time attached to a regular battalion of the Bedfords, and studied for the militia competitive examination with Major Heath, an army crammer in Folkestone, a distinctive character with Kaiser Bill moustaches, and duly came top in the 1907 examination. Although he was by then a full lieutenant in the militia, he had to revert to second lieutenant on joining his preferred regular regiment, the Cameronians.

(#litres_trial_promo) Osbert Sitwell found it all arranged for him by his forceful father:

Even Henry, who usually appeared to possess a special insight into the workings of my father’s mind, could not help me … Then, one morning, I found out: for I read, suddenly turning a page of the newspaper that had just arrived, that a 2nd Lieut. F. O. S. Sitwell had just been granted a commission in the Yeomanry, and was, from the Yeomanry, attached to a famous regiment of Hussars.

Osbert duly reported at Aldershot in the foggy winter of 1911–12, and his first shock was getting in to his mess kit, then worn for dinner on weeknights: officers relaxed in the down-market black tie for dinner at weekends.

Every part of the body had to be dragged and pinched and buttoned, and the boots were so tight that one could neither pull them on nor take them off, and remained for many minutes in a kind of seal-like flipper-limbo as to the feet. Only by the kindness and perseverance of Robbins – my new servant who, as I write, some thirty-three years later, is still with me … was I able to encase myself in this unaccustomed glory.

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In November 1912 he transferred to the regular army, and joined the Grenadier Guards at the Tower of London. Here he was interviewed by the regimental lieutenant colonel who seemed to be:

the improbable realisation of an ideal; an ideal cherished by a considerable number of contemporaries, including most officers and all the best tailors and haberdashers, hosiers, shoemakers and barbers in London, indeed in England … At a single glance it might be deemed possible by the inexperienced, such was the apparent sincerity and straightforwardness of his self-presentation, to know all about him, even to write a testimonial, strong sense of duty, hard-playing (golf, cricket, polo), generous, brave, fine shot, adequate rider, man of the world, C. of E.

He remembered the great royal review of the Brigade of Guards on 28 April 1913 as ‘a final salute from an old order which was to perish, and constituted for those taking part in it – and how few survived the next two years! – a sort of fanfare, heralding the war’.

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SATURDAY NIGHT SOLDIERS (#ulink_414b30a3-6f3a-50d3-af05-c130f4d1b248)

There were part-time soldiers in Britain long before the foundation of the regular army in 1660, and the London’s Honourable Artillery Company, once the Guild of St George and then part of the London Trained Bands, can trace its origins back to 1537. By Haldane’s time there were three distinct strands in the volunteer and auxiliary forces of the Crown, and the Norfolk Committee, one of the bodies which had investigated British military performance in the Boer War, had concluded that between them they were neither fitted for taking the field against regular troops nor for providing a framework of future expansion. Yet part-time forces provided relatively large numbers of inexpensive manpower at a time when the regular army was under-recruited; they had powerful political support, most notably in the House of Lords, where militia colonels were firmly entrenched; and they seemed to offer a real prospect of widening military service so as to create that ‘real national army’ that Haldane sought.

The militia was founded on men’s common law obligation to provide home defence, and was not obliged to serve abroad. Originally selected by ballot from lists of able-bodied men maintained by parish constables, its efficiency ebbed and flowed with the danger of invasion. It had spent much of the Napoleonic period embodied, that is called up for, full-time service, but in the nineteenth century it slipped back into its old torpor, its members turning out for infrequent training. In social composition the militia looked much like the regular army. Those who did not wish to serve could hire substitutes to do so on their behalf; militia officers were chosen by Lords Lieutenant of counties from the gentlemen of the shire, and there was a steady flow of both officers and men into the regular army.

The volunteers, first formed to meet the perceived threat of revolutionary France, had been revived by the invasion scare of the 1860s. They were wholly distinct from the militia. Members of volunteer units were required to purchase their own uniforms and much of their equipment. In many companies officers were elected, and they received their commissions from Lords Lieutenant rather than the monarch. This was Mr Pooter under arms, and as such a favourite butt of Punch’s cartoonists. In 1899 the volunteer Lieutenant Tompkins, ‘excellent fellow, but poor soldier’, was asked by an inspecting general:

Now, Sir, you have your battalion in quarter column facing south. How would you get it into line, in the quickest possible way, facing north-east?