Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

‘Nineteen, sir,’ I murmured in polite concern.

‘Nineteen for Kitchener’s Army,’ he explained. ‘The Special Reserve for Officers is eighteen …’ So a miracle came to pass. On the 25th April 1915, one day after my eighteenth birthday, I was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the reserve battalion of the 64th Regiment of Foot in the regular army, an infantry regiment which boasted a long list of battle honours …

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A public school boy who wanted a commission could scarcely fail to get one. But when R. C. Sherriff was being interviewed he gave the name of his school, only to discover that it was not on the approved list: the fact that it was a grammar school with a long and distinguished history did not help. His interviewer regretted that there was nothing that could be done, and Sherriff duly signed on as a private, to gain his commission the hard way.

Not all public school boys, students or graduates wanted commissions. Sometimes this was a matter of principle. Frederick Keeling (‘Siberian Joe’) was twenty-eight in 1914, a Cambridge graduate and a member of the Independent Labour Party. He enlisted in 6/Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and refused a commission, though he rose steadily through the ranks to become a company sergeant major in 1916. That summer he wrote to his mother-in-law:

I may be knocked out in the next few days. If so, this is just a line to you, dear. I don’t contemplate death, but it is all a bloody chance out here. If there is any sort of survival of consciousness, death can hardly fail to be interesting, and if there is anything doing on the other side, I will stir something up. Nirvana be damned!

He was killed at Delville Wood on 18 August, and never knew that he had won the Military Medal, gazetted the following February.

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Richard Henry Tawney, a devout Christian, socialist and distinguished economic historian, enlisted in a New Army battalion of the Manchesters at the age of thirty-four, also declined a commission and was wounded as a sergeant on the Somme. A general visited him while he was in hospital and warned the sister in charge of his ward that she was looking after a national treasure. Shocked, she asked Tawney why he had not told her that he was a gentleman. Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the Morning Post, joined 2/2nd London in 1914, refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No, I will do the thing fairly,’ he declared. ‘I will take my place on the ranks.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He fought in Gallipoli, and was then transferred to 12/London. By now a sergeant, and recommended for the commission he felt he had to earn, he was killed when 56th Division assaulted Leuze Wood on 7 October 1916. By then he had established himself as a poet of some distinction and, like so many poets, expressed a rage in his writing that was absent from his military persona.

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?

Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?

Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?

Even more volunteers wanted to stay in the ranks because that was where their friends were. Some units, like many of the London battalions constituting 33rd Division, were filled with men who might more naturally have been officers. The division included five public school battalions, 18/ to 21/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex; an ‘Empire’ and a Kensington battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; a West Ham battalion (13/Essex); the 1st Football Battalion (properly 17/Middlesex); and the Church Lads’ Battalion (16/King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Even the divisional pioneer battalion, best, if bluntly, described as military navvies, was 1st Public Works (18/Middlesex).

(#litres_trial_promo) The Sportsmen’s Battalion (23/Royal Fusiliers) included in its ranks two England cricketers, the country’s lightweight boxing champion and the former lord mayor of Exeter. A member of the unit described his hut in the battalion’s camp at Hornchurch:

In this hut the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. In the second the man who formerly drove his motor-car. Both had enlisted at the same time at the Hotel Cecil … Other beds in the hut were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland, … a photographer, a poultry farmer, an old sea dog who had rounded Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals, a bank clerk, and so on. It must not be thought that this hut was an exceptional one. Every hut was practically the same, and every hut was jealous of its reputation.

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Many of these men subsequently did earn commissions – some 3,000 from 33rd Division alone – but many more were killed or crippled before they did so.

Even getting into the ranks could prove tricky. Stuart Dolden was ‘absolutely shattered’ when he was turned down at his enlistment medical because his chest measurement was two inches under requirement. He immediately went to a ‘physical culture centre’ in Dover Street, whose proprietor told him that his course, of ten half-hourly sessions, would cost 30 guineas, and had been taken by many famous people including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Sir John French. Dolden riposted that ‘I was not concerned with these gentlemen since it was my father who would have to foot the bill’, and managed to get it reduced to 6 guineas. The exercises worked, and Dolden joined the London Scottish, paying a pound for the privilege of doing so. It was a good deal easier for Anthony French, signing on at Somerset House, with a grunted monologue from the medical officer:

Hmm … Shirt off, trousers down … mmm … Cough … mmm … Not very tall … mmm … Scales over there … mmm … Silly business war … mmm … Just ten stone … shouldn’t have thought it … Hmm … Chest measurement … mmm … expand … mmm … Blast the Germans anyway … mmm … two-and-a-half inches … elastic lungs … mmm … try the Navy next time … Hmm … Mouth open … wider … mmm … Say aahhh … mmm … ninety-nine … mmmmm … General Service … Next man, Corporal … mmm. I took my shilling and departed.

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I. G. Andrew enlisted in the Glasgow University Company of 6/Cameron Highlanders. He found life in a tented camp near Aldershot ‘almost unendurably hard’, though it ridded him of ‘a certain priggish donnishness’. The bonds of mateship came quickly. He and three comrades ‘marched together, drank together, ate together and at night slept next to each other wherever it might be – tent, hut, billet or under the open air of heaven’. His company sergeant major was no ordinary man, but ‘a Roberston of Struhan, the son of a Colonel, the grandson of a major-general and an undergraduate of Magdalen College, Oxford’. Roberston had been a captain of rifle volunteers, a justice of the peace in India, and gave his profession on enlistment as ‘actor’. Officially too old for the front, Roberston nonetheless managed to engineer his way to France, where he was wounded at Loos. There was initially too little khaki to go round, and most New Army units wore ‘Kitchener Blue’, deeply unpopular because it made them look like bus drivers. 6/Camerons, however, had red tunics with white facings, postmen’s trousers, and, as Andrew found, ‘cap comforters closely resembling tea cosies’. The full majesty of the kilt did not come till 1915.

One night in camp Andrew’s pal John Irish sang ‘that grand old song The Trumpeter’. It is the most poignant of the old army’s tear-jerkers, with the trumpeter urging his comrades to:

… Tread light o’er the dead in the valley

Who are lying around, face down to the groundsheet

And they can’t hear me sounding the Rally …

‘It is a solemn moment,’ he reflected, ‘when a young man first senses his own mortality,’ and many sensed it then. Offered a commission through the good offices of a friendly MP, he turned it down and went to France as a lance corporal. John Irish departed to be a second lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the farewell was painful.

I was never to see him again, and when he met a soldier’s death at Arras a year later, I felt that something quite irreplaceable had gone out of my life. [John Irish stood] with the tears streaming down his face as he sobbed, ‘Good-bye Tubby, and the best of luck.’

Andrew’s battalion was part of the exceptional 9th Scottish Division. Second Lieutenant R. B. Talbot Kelly, a regular gunner in one of the batteries supporting it, remembered how:

Our Scottish infantry created an enormous impression on our minds. Never again was I to see so many thousands of splendid men, the very heart and soul of the nation. These were they who, on the outbreak of war, had rushed to enlist, the best and first of Kitchener’s New Armies. And here we saw them, bronzed and dignified, regiments of young gods.

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The Camerons went into action at Loos 820 strong and emerged with two officers and seventy men: Lance Corporal Andrew, himself wounded, saw Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Scotland standing over the commanding officer and asked if he should fetch stretcher-bearers. ‘It’s no good,’ said the RSM, ‘the old man’s dying.’ Andrew at last felt able to take a commission and, while convalescing, wrote to the commanding officer of 5/Scottish Rifles, who agreed to take him. ‘A man of means’ thanks to his outfit allowance, he went to the best tailor in Glasgow for his uniform, but when he reported for duty at Catterick he discovered that ‘second lieutenants were two a penny’.

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Not all Pals’ battalions broke the old army’s rules quite as dramatically as units such as 23/Royal Fusiliers or 6/Camerons, with their high proportion of educated men serving in the ranks. The 31st Division presented a fairer social cross section, though even here there were far more artisans, students and office workers than ever appeared in the old army. The division’s 92nd Brigade had four battalions of East Yorkshires, known as the Hull Commercials, the Hull Tradesmen, the Hull Sportsmen and, for want of a better name, the Hull T’others. In 92nd Brigade were three West Yorkshire battalions, the Leeds Pals and 1st and 2nd Bradford Pals, as well as 18/Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. The third brigade, 94th, contained 12/York and Lancaster (The Sheffield City Battalion, with many university students in its ranks), 13/ and 14/York and Lancaster (1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals) and our old friends 11/ East Lancashire (The Accrington Pals).

The divisional pioneer battalion, T’owd Twelfth (one of several northern battalions to use that name), was 12/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, many of them miners from Charlesworth Pit who had streamed into Leeds to enlist in 1914.

(#litres_trial_promo) Its composition underlines another important point about the New Armies. Many volunteers came from working-class areas with a tradition of industrial militancy: these were not the products of a cowed, deferential society. But by mid-1915 over 230,000 miners, about one-quarter of the workforce, had volunteered. ‘The compatibility of class consciousness and patriotism,’ observed J. M. Winter, ‘could have no better illustration. Of course, we should never completely discount the desire of some miners to get out of the mines, but sentiments about nation and empire rather than discontent, were behind mass enlistment in the industry.’

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Wide variations in regional enlistment can barely be summarised here, and so I pass lightly over the rich tapestry of the New Armies. But three specific divisions deserve early mention. In late September 1914 a Welsh National Executive Committee was formed, with the aim of raising a Welsh Army Corps of two divisions for inclusion in the New Armies. David Lloyd George had already given the concept his eloquent support.

I should like to see a Welsh Army in the field. I should like to see the race who faced the Normans for hundreds of years in their struggle for freedom, the race that helped to win the battle of Crecy, the race that fought for a generation under Glendower against the greatest captain in Europe – I should like to see that race give a good taste of its quality in this struggle.

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The committee, along with the numerous individuals and corporations already recruiting in Wales, made a serious attempt to attract Welsh-speaking officers and men. Recruiting posters, in both Welsh and English, bore calls to arms from Prince David, ‘Brother of Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales’, though there was no historical basis for the words. A short-lived attempt to clothe the troops in Welsh grey homespun cloth called Brethyn Llwyd was marred by a shortage of cloth and the fact that the grey jackets at £1 apiece were more expensive than khaki at 14/7d or Kitchener Blue at 14/2d: and in any event officers and men preferred khaki. There were sharp clashes between Kitchener, who complained that the army could not be ‘a political machine’, and Lloyd George, inflamed by Kitchener’s refusal to allow Welsh to be the language spoken on parade and his reluctance to shift other Welsh units into the new corps to bring it up to strength.

It was soon clear that there would be too few volunteers to raise a full corps, and in December the single division that could be brought to full manning was called 43rd (Welsh), and renumbered 38th (Welsh) in April 1915. Local politics was generally well to the fore when it came to raising the New Armies: indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. But several factors, such as Welsh nationalism, concerns about the impact of Nonconformity with its strong element of pacifism, and the personality of Lloyd George, all played a greater than usual part in colouring the composition of 38th Division. One of Lloyd George’s sons was aide de camp to the divisional commander, and some senior commanders owed their selection more to their political backing than their military ability. And the division seems to have suffered more than most from the slow arrival of its equipment, another consequence of the army’s rapid expansion: 16/Welsh (Cardiff City) received its first eighty working rifles in August 1915, and it was not until October that enough rifles were available for men to fire at their range course at Winchester prior to embarking for France. The divisional artillery had no horses till April that year, and even then its gunners were still drilling on tent poles mounted on wheels.

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But how painfully hard the division tried in its first big battle. On 7 July 1916, in the early stages of the Somme, it was sent in to clear the great slab of Mametz Wood, jutting down from Longueval Ridge and the German second position. It was unutterably confusing fighting in a wood in full summer foliage, and would have tried more experienced troops and staffs. ‘I could not push a way through it,’ wrote Captain Llewelyn Wyn Griffith,

and I had to return to the ride. Years of neglect had turned the Wood into a formidable barrier, a mile deep. Heavy shelling of the Southern end had beaten down some of the young growth, but it had also thrown large branches into a barricade. Equipment, ammunition, rolls of barbed wire, tins of food, gas-helmets and rifles were lying about everywhere. There were more corpses than men, but there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves, and, as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death, and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg, with its torn flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf …

A message was now on its way to some quiet village in Wales, to a grey farmhouse on the slope of a hill running down to Cardigan Bay, or to a miner’s cottage in a South Wales valley, a word of death …

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His brother Watcyn, a private soldier in the same Royal Welch Fusilier battalion (unthinkable in the old army), was killed. ‘I had not even buried him,’ lamented Griffith as he left this charnel place, ‘nor was his grave ever found.’

At the very end of the fighting in the wood the division’s Welshness was still painfully evident. ‘I crouched with some men to shelter,’ recalled Griffith. ‘We talked in Welsh, for they were Anglesey folk; one was a young boy, and after a thunderous crash in our ears he began to cry out for his mother, in a thin boyish voice, “mam, mam…”