Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

Well, Sir, do you know, that’s what I have always wondered.

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Victorian volunteers were wonderfully bearded, favoured baggy uniforms of French grey, and took their marksmanship very seriously, spending weekends at Bisley ranges tending their muzzle-loading Enfield and new breech-loading Snider rifles and smelling powerfully of black powder, gun oil and cheroots. Regulars doubted whether these hirsute tradesmen were really soldiers at all, and had little doubt that they would not stand the onset of French infantry. Matters were not helped by the fact that the green-ribboned Volunteer Decoration, awarded for long service, carried the post-nominal initials VD, displayed with a pride which puzzled some regular soldiers.

The Yeomanry were different yet again. The first units of ‘gentlemen and yeomanry’ had been raised in 1794. They were volunteers who needed to own, or at least have regular access to, a horse, and this socio-economic distinction made them useful to a government which lacked a police force. Yeomanry were involved in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819: part of what went wrong that day was occasioned by the poor training of men and horses, and part by the fact that the yeomanry were middle-class men with an animus against the ‘mob’. The Yeomanry, like the volunteers, saw a revival as a result of the invasion scare of the 1860s, and there were thirty-eight regiments in existence in 1899. Many yeomen volunteered, as Imperial Yeomanry, to fight in the Boer War, no less than 178 companies grouped in 38 battalions, and after the war more regiments were raised, some of them from urban areas with few real links to the horse-owning farmers of yesteryear.

Yeomanry regiments had little in common with volunteer battalions. Their officers could (and so often did) fit comfortably into regular cavalry regiments, and many of their troopers were scarcely less well-heeled. They carried out their fortnight’s annual training in the grounds of the great houses of the land, where things were done in proper yeoman style, as a correspondent reported of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry in camp at Woodhall Park in 1903.

The camp is pleasantly situated on sloping ground in front of the mansion, and close to the River Beane … There are go bell tents, four men to each, though the officers, of course, have one to themselves. The tents all have boarded floors and folding iron bedsteads are provided. The baths and chests-of-drawers have this year been dispensed with, and if the men want a ‘dip’ there are the inviting waters of the Beane close by … The stables are wood and canvas structures … Messrs Lipton are again catering for the officers and Sergeant Buck and his son Trooper Buck are again supplying the regimental mess. A Morris tube shooting range has been fixed up by Mr Buck for the amusement of the men and there are also a skittle alley, reading room, ping-pong board and other forms of recreation.

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The Middlesex Yeomanry enjoyed an even more elegant camp on the very eve of war, as Trooper S. F. Hatton remembered.

Reveille about 7.00, hot coffee by specially engaged cooks, the early grooming, water and feed. A two-course breakfast in the Troopers’ mess – (the damned waiters are a bit slow this morning) – then dress for parade … A morning’s drill or manoeuvring on the Downs, and back to camp, grooming, watering, feeding; the regimental band in full-dress uniform playing all the time during ‘stables’. A wash, change into mess kit … Luncheon, beautifully served by hired mess waiters on spotless linen … In the afternoon saddlery and equipment were given over to a batman to clean for the morning – it was customary for four or five Troopers to run a ‘civvy’ batman between them during the camp – and then change into grey flannels for the river, lounging, sleeping or anything else Satan found us to do.

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Sir John French had served as adjutant of the Northumberland Hussars, and his foreword to the 1924 regimental history is a vignette of a vanished age.

They were commanded by the Earl of Ravensworth, than whom no better sportsman ever lived. The officers were all good sportsmen and fine horsemen, and to those who can look back fifty years such names as Crookson, Straker, Henderson and Hunter will carry conviction of the truth of what I say. Two of them were Masters of Hounds, but my most intimate friend was Charley Hunter, a born leader of cavalry, whose skill in handing £50 screws over five-barred gates I shall never forget.

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Yeomanry officers were as active in both Houses of Parliament as they were on the hunting field. Major Winston Churchill MP was in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. H. C. Henderson MP commanded the Berkshire Yeomanry. The Hon. Walter Guinness was Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds and a major in the Suffolk Yeomanry: when war broke out B Squadron, whose command he had just relinquished, ‘had recently been taken over by Frank Goldsmith, who was Member of Parliament for the Stowmarket Division’.

(#litres_trial_promo) B Squadron was graced by Sir Cuthbert Quilter, MP for Sudbury. Brigadier General the Earl of Longford was to die commanding a Yeomanry brigade at Gallipoli.

Haldane’s reforms swept up militia, volunteers and yeomanry. They turned militia battalions into Special Reserve battalions, which trained part-time just as the militia had, but would provide drafts to reinforce the regular battalions of their regiments in the event of war. Their composition, too, mirrored that of the militia: well-to-do officers and soldiers who could have fitted easily into the regular army. Some young men used the Special Reserve as a way of testing the water. George Ashurst was born in the Lancashire village of Tontine in 1895. ‘We were a poor family,’ he recalled. ‘My father worked in a stone quarry about a mile from the village, and his wages were rather poor. To make things worse, he kept half of his wages for himself and spent them at the village pub.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He became a colliery clerk on 12/6d a week, but when he lost his job his father warned him that if he took on manual work ‘I will break your bloody neck.’

Ashurst went to a recruiting office to sign on. He said that he wanted to sign on for seven years, but the sergeant, kinder than many, replied: ‘When you get into the army you might not like it, so I will tell you what to do. Join the Special Reserve, which means that you will do six months in the barracks and seven years on the reserve, with just a month’s camp every year.’ He joined the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers, and trained at the depot at Wellington Barracks, Bury. ‘I got on very well as a soldier,’ he recalled,

except for little reminders from the sergeant-major that I was a soldier now and ‘Take your hands out of your pockets, stick your chest out and your chin in’ as I walked across the barrack square. I felt really fit, too, with cross-country running and the gym exercises we had daily, and I loved the musketry lessons and the shooting on the firing range with the .22 rifles.

There was also a school and a teacher in the barracks where one could go in the afternoon and sit at desks with pen and paper to improve one’s education. There were examinations, and we could get a third-class certificate. If you were also a first-class shot with the rifle you got sixpence a day on your pay.

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Haldane faced a far greater challenge in forming the Territorial Force, which came into being on 1 April 1908. It was organised in fourteen mounted brigades each consisting of three regiments of yeomanry, a battery of horse artillery and a field ambulance, and fourteen infantry divisions, each with three four-battalion infantry brigades, artillery, engineers, transport and medical services.

(#litres_trial_promo) He hoped that it would both support and expand the army, first providing home defence, thus freeing the regulars of the BEF to go abroad, and then, after six months’ post-mobilisation training, being fit to take the field abroad itself. But the Territorial Force was the child of compromise. The National Service League was right to see it as a means of avoiding conscription, and by 1913 the Army Council was itself in favour of conscription. Yet in order to persuade men to sign up, they were not to be liable for foreign service unless they volunteered for it. Because he rightly believed that, given a chance, the regular army would drain territorial funds in order to finance itself, he created County Territorial Associations which maintained the Territorial Force property, with drill halls and rifle ranges, and supplied units with much of their equipment. These not only went some way towards protecting the Territorial Force from regular army pillaging, but, with the active co-operation of King Edward, swung county hierarchies solidly behind the new force. Lords Lieutenant were ex-officio presidents of their associations, and The Territorial Year Book for 1909 shows just how successful Haldane had been in linking landed wealth, local military experience and big employers in his associations.

But the experiment was not wholly successful. The Territorial Force peaked at 270,041 officers and men in 1909, and was only 245,779 strong by September 1913. Wastage ran at 12.4 percent per annum compared with the regular army’s 6 percent, and while the old unreformed auxiliary forces had represented 3.6 percent of the male population in 1903 the Territorial Force represented only 0.63 percent of it ten years later.

(#litres_trial_promo) Its equipment was obsolescent: infantry had early marks of the Lee-Enfield rifle, not the Short Magazine of the regulars, and artillery, organised in four rather than the six-gun batteries of the regular army, had 15-pounder guns and 5-inch howitzers. When the regular infantry restructured from eight companies to four in 1913, the territorials did not follow suit. Many employers were no more helpful about releasing men for service with the Territorial Force than they had been with the volunteers. While some regiments took their territorial battalions to their hearts, others did not. There was a long-running dispute about the wisdom of giving territorials artillery at all, and eventually territorial gunners wore the Royal Artillery cap badge with a blank scroll where regulars bore their battle honour ‘UBIQUE’.

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The territorials had their own marked differences. ‘I was commissioned into the 5th Scottish Rifles in February 1911,’ recalled John Reith. ‘The social class of the man in the ranks was higher than that of any other Regiment in Glasgow.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The London Regiment, which consisted of twenty-eight battalions, all territorial, ranged from the very smart 28/London (Artists’ Rifles) which had been commanded by Frederick, Lord Leighton and had been formed for men with artistic leanings, to the rather less smart 11/ London, the Finsbury Rifles according to the Army List but known, from the location of its drill hall at the top of Penton Street and the alleged propensities of its members, as the Pentonville Pissers. When young Alan Harding, a post-office clerk, decided to join the territorials he chose 11/London precisely because he was able to get a commission: he would have had little chance in, say, the 13/London (Kensington) or 14/London (London Scottish). He was a lieutenant colonel with a Military Cross in 1918, joined the regular army and died Field Marshal the Lord Harding of Petherton.

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Bryan Latham agreed about the difference between battalions. ‘Amongst foremost London clubs before the war,’ he wrote,

could be numbered the headquarters of half a dozen of the leading Territorial battalions. Such regiments as the Artists’ Rifles, Civil Service Rifles, the HAC, the London Rifle Brigade, London Scottish and the Kensingtons … Friends would join the same battalion, almost on leaving school; I was in my nineteenth year when I enlisted in 1913, my brother Russell 18, and my cousin, John Chappell, the same age.

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Latham joined 5/London, the London Rifle Brigade, whose headquarters in Bunhill Row included offices, stores, a large drill hall (also equipped as ‘a first-class gym’), messes, canteens and a billiard room. The athletic club met there once a week. There were shooting matches at Bisley, and an annual marching competition, with a thirteen-mile route through the outer suburbs. Men wore full equipment, and had to complete the march in under three hours to have any chance of winning. For weekend training the eight companies would parade on Saturday afternoon at Waterloo station and travel by train to Weybridge. They marched to the local drill hall, and had supper at a restaurant, followed by a singsong: ‘at such affairs every member of the LRB, whatever his rank, met on the basis of comradeship; on parade army discipline and routine took over again’. There was an early reveille, breakfast, and then manoeuvres on Weybridge Common. ‘These took the form of long lines of skirmishers extending to three yards, instantly advancing by short rushes, one half of the company giving covering fire while the other half moved forward,’ recalled Rifleman Latham. ‘The whole culminated in fixing bayonets and charging a hill.’ The battalion returned to Waterloo at about 8.00 on a Sunday evening:

Everybody was brown and felt fit; it had been, of course, a lovely sunny weekend, but then all weekends before the war seemed to be sunny, or perhaps it is merely the thought of them in golden retrospect.

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The London Regiment was unique: territorial infantry battalions were generally part of regiments which included regular battalions too. Most followed the pattern of the Queen’s Royal Regiment. In 1914 both regular battalions were in England, 1/Queen’s at Bordon in Hampshire and 2/Queen’s at Lyndhurst in the New Forest. The Special Reserve battalion, 3/Queen’s, was based at the regimental depot, Stoughton barracks in Guildford, and there were two territorial battalions, 4/Queen’s, with its headquarters at Croydon, and 5/Queen’s at Guildford. Most of the half-dozen or so regular permanent staff instructors attached to each of the territorial battalions were regular Queensmen, although the adjutant of 4/Queen’s, unusually, was Captain P. H. C. Groves of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Battalions of the London regiment had regular affiliations, the London Rifle Brigade with its regular homonym, for instance. The Queen’s was associated with 22/London and 24/ London (The Queen’s), based in Bermondsey and Kennington respectively, which wore its cap badge and had many Queensmen on its permanent staff.

There were inevitably exceptions to this pattern. Some counties, such as Cambridgeshire and Herefordshire, were too small to have their own regiments. Regular recruits went to a nearby regiment – the Suffolks for Cambridgeshire, and the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry for Herefordshire. Larger counties, such as Surrey, could maintain two regiments, in this case the Queen’s and the East Surreys. And three regiments with exceptionally good recruiting areas, the Royal Fusiliers (City of London), Middlesex Regiment and Worcestershire Regiment, had three regular battalions, which skewed subsequent battalion numbering. New Army battalions, as we shall soon see, numbered after the territorial battalions of the same regiment. The foot guards had only regular battalions, three each for the Grenadiers and Coldstream, two for the Scots and one for the Irish. There was, as yet, no Welsh Guards: the regiment would not be formed until 1915, mounting its first guard on Buckingham Palace on 1 March, St David’s Day, that year.

Haldane had stuck steadfastly to the principle that the Territorial Force should contain all arms, and so it did. The fact that it attracted many middle-class men who would have been unlikely to join the ranks of the regular army meant that many of the men who joined specialist units such as the Tyne Electrical Engineers – formed to maintain searchlights and communications in the Tyne defences – already had skills which the army could use. It was harder to create purely military skills in the training time available. Norman Tennant enlisted in 11th Battery, 4th North Riding Howitzer Brigade, in 1913, with several friends from Ilkley Grammar School. In August that year his unit camped at Aberystwyth. ‘To this day,’ he mused, ‘the smell of crushed grass, which is always to be found inside marquees, reminds me of the rough and ready meals on the bare trestle tables, slightly flavoured with smoke from the cookhouse fires …’. He found that the experience was useful in more than a military sense.

It was natural that groups of school friends should be drawn together, in addition to making new contacts, and this continued throughout the war. In due course we came to appreciate the sterling qualities of some of the rougher local types and responded to their innate friendliness but here in our first annual camp we felt rather shy and tended to associate with those we already knew so well.

Horses presented a real challenge, especially his ‘spare wheeler’ –

a vast immobile brute with thick hairy legs and drooping head; it seemed quite happy to spend much of its existence standing perfectly still, an occasional tremor of its lower bearded lip indicated that life was still present.

Tennant served in the same battery throughout the war, and recalled ‘the care and devotion to his men by the battery commander, Major P. C. Petrie DSO MC, who helped raise it, train it and commanded it till the end of the war’. Its discipline, he believed, ‘was derived more from a sense of comradeship than from the methods normally employed by the Regular army’.

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Haldane also formalised the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). The forerunners of these had been founded in Victorian times as rifle volunteer corps attached to universities or public schools. Some of the latter took their corps very seriously: the Eton College Rifle Volunteers had a regular adjutant and turned out in a natty shade of the French grey. Enough members of Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers volunteered to fight in the Boer War for the unit to earn a ‘SOUTH AFRICA’ battle honour. Haldane established junior divisions of the OTC at public schools and some grammar schools: successful cadets earned Certificate B, a very basic certificate of military knowledge. Senior divisions were at universities, and their cadets could earn Certificate A, which was believed to fit them for a territorial commission. More broadly, the scheme was expected to attract men and boys of ‘the intellectual and moral attainments likely to fit them for the rank of officers’, even if they did not immediately put these qualities to use. Between August 1914 and March the following year, 20,577 officers were commissioned from OTCs, and another 12,290 ex-OTC men were serving in the ranks.

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NEW ARMY (#ulink_75ed65ad-784a-541f-83f7-e7353679d9d1)

That arch-regular Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in the summer of 1914, had a low opinion of the Territorial Force. In part it stemmed from his experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had served briefly with Chanzy’s Army of the Loire and had been less than impressed by French irregulars. In part it reflected the fact that he had spent most of his career abroad, and had been wholly untouched by Haldane’s advocacy of a national army. Indeed, he admitted to the formidable leader of the Ulster Unionists: ‘I don’t know Europe; I don’t know England; and I don’t know the British Army.’ And in part it embodied his own instinctive mistrust of the amateur: on the morning that he took over the War Office he declared that ‘he could take no account of anything but regular soldiers’.

(#litres_trial_promo) And to raise a new one he decided to bypass the territorial system altogether.

Kitchener’s decision has been widely criticised, but it was not wholly illogical. Many territorials immediately volunteered for foreign service: F. S. Hatton proudly remembered that in his unit ‘the men who did not wish to volunteer for foreign service were asked to take a pace to the rear. The ranks remained unbroken.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Northumberland Hussars affirmed that all its men had already accepted foreign service as a condition of their enlistment. But the picture was far patchier elsewhere. Walter Nicholson, a regular staff officer in what was to become the very good 51st Highland Division, admitted: ‘We were very far from being a division fit for defence.’