Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

(#litres_trial_promo) The division lost over 4,000 men, and was so badly jarred that it was not engaged in another major battle till the first day of Third Ypres, 31 July 1917. It suffered 28,635 casualties in the whole of the war, but somehow Mametz Wood is the right place for its memorial, a proud red dragon glaring out across Happy Valley towards the blank-faced wood and Flat Iron Copse Cemetery full of the division’s dead, with ripped-up barbed wire in its claws.

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It was not easy for all Welshmen to reconcile nationalist politics of the Chapel’s reservations about violence with service in the British army. However, the problems confronting many Irish recruits were even more serious. The long-running issue of Home Rule had not simply divided Ireland but had infected British politics more broadly, and had produced the Curragh ‘mutiny’ of March 1914, when the officers of the Curragh-based 3rd Cavalry Brigade, under Brigadier General Hubert Gough, declared that they would resign their commissions rather than march north to compel Ulster to join a united and independent Ireland. Indeed, so heated were passions on both sides of Ireland’s cultural divide that it has been well argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 actually prevented a civil war in Ireland which seemed inevitable if the British government pressed ahead with Home Rule.

But if the outbreak of a large war did indeed delay a smaller one, it nonetheless faced Irish nationalists with a cruel dilemma. Should they take the view, as some of their ancestors might have done, that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, or should they support the war in the hope that by doing so they would demonstrate their responsibility and maturity? The nationalist leader John Redmond immediately declared that the war was:

undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, and a regret to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of history, if young Ireland continued her efforts to remain at home to defend the shores of Ireland from military invasion, and shirk from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race across its history.

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Sinn Féin propaganda had declared that an Irishman who joined the British army was ‘a traitor to his country and a felon in his soul’, though this had not stopped 9.1 percent of the regular army of 1914 from being Irish. However, the decision of constitutional nationalists to encourage enlistment sharply divided them from their more extreme brethren, and led to many Irishmen ascending history’s old Calvary, and fighting bravely in the ranks of an army to whose political principles they were firmly opposed.

With the active support of Redmond and his colleagues, Irishmen were enlisted into New Army battalions of Irish regiments. Many professional men who had been officers in the National Volunteers volunteered: indeed, there were so many good potential officers that some were sent off to England to help officer the Tyneside Irish. John Wray, solicitor and son of a nationalist election agent, was given an immediate commission in the Connaught Rangers and brought in 200 of his own volunteers. The 7/Leinsters maintained a cadet company for potential officers, and of the 161 men who had passed through its ranks by December 1915, thirty-five were to be killed in action. Three hundred and fifty rugby players from Dublin, white collar and tie men, paraded at Lansdowne Road rugby ground and then marched through the city to the Curragh, where they joined 7/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, where they became known as ‘Toffs in the Old Toughs’. A full company of Dublin dockers enlisted, and were known as the Larkinites after their union leader James Larkin, no friend of the British government or capitalism. And, as was so often the case that heady summer, there were odd phenomena: six officers and 225 men of the Royal Guernsey Militia, many of them French-speaking, volunteered for 6/Royal Irish, as they had been so impressed by the Royal Irish battalion which had been in garrison on their island. Two divisions were soon formed, 10th (Irish), in 1st New Army, and 16th (Irish), part of the 2nd New Army. Neither was ever wholly Irish, still less wholly nationalist, but there was a solid and unmistakable streak of Irishness running through both formations.

Ulstermen, too, faced a dilemma when war broke out. The Ulster Volunteer Force was 80,000 strong, and many of its units, organised on British military lines, were well armed and well drilled. There were initial doubts about throwing the considerable weight of the UVF behind the British government (against which it might so easily have found itself fighting), but these were soon resolved after discussions between Kitchener and Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader. The formation of what was to become 36th (Ulster) Division began in September 1914, and many of its battalions were firmly based on units of the UVF. Frank Crozier had been forced to leave the army in 1908 after bouncing cheques, which one astute commentator has called ‘a lifelong habit’. In 1914 he was, as he put it, ‘a hired mercenary’ training Carson’s UVF, and was quickly re-commissioned into the British army to be second in command to ‘my Shankhill Road boys’, now transmuted into 9/Royal Irish Rifles. Before the transition was complete he watched a regular battalion of the Norfolks leave for France, seen off by a guard of honour of the UVF’s West Belfast Regiment. ‘Five months previously,’ mused Crozier, ‘these very men of the Norfolks had quitted Belfast for Holyrood, owing to the menace in their midst of the very men who were doing them honour now, and from whom they evidently felt disposed to accept the compliment.’

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The iconography of 36th Division made its origins clear. The divisional sign was the Red Hand of Ulster; some units wore badges which harked back to their UVF origins, and when the division took immortality by storm on 1 July 1916 (the anniversary, in New Style, of the Battle of the Boyne), there were orange sashes in evidence and the old bark of ‘No Surrender!’ in the air. The division scored the only significant success north of the Bapaume road that day, and Ulster Tower, a copy of Helen’s Tower at Clandeboye, near Belfast, where the division did much of its training, stands on the ground it captured at the cost of 5,000 of its officers and men.

Yet we must be careful not to jam 10th and 16th Divisions on the one hand, and 36th on the other, into the obvious political niches. Some Irish regiments (notably the Royal Irish Rifles) had always recruited both Catholics and Protestants, and there was more than a little sense of a deep and common Irishness that expunged more superficial divides. ‘Once we tacitly agreed to let the past be buried,’ observed an officer in 10th Division, ‘we found thousands of points on which we agreed.’ The same music could speak to both. When the pipes of the Royal Irish howled out Brian Bora, that tune ‘traditionally played by some Irish Regiments to lift hearts and square shoulders’, in the assault on Guillemont on 15 September 1916, a man did not have to come from the South to feel his spirits soar. And when a northern-raised battalion of Irish Rifles met a southern battalion on the march with its band playing the old rebel air She’s The Most Distressful Country, there were cheers of approval.

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The apotheosis of the fighting Irish came on 7 June 1917 when 16th and 36th Division attacked side by side in 2nd Army’s great assault on Messines Ridge. John Redmond’s brother, Major Willie Redmond MP, who had last spoken in the House of Commons just a month before to demand immediate Home Rule, was, at fifty-six, too old for front-line service. But he begged to be allowed back to his old battalion, 6/Royal Irish, and was hit as he walked forward with it, and the 36th Division’s stretcher-bearers picked him up. The wound would probably not have killed a younger, fitter man, but it was too much for Willie Redmond. A Roman Catholic chaplain told how:

He received every possible kindness from Ulster soldiers. In fact, an Englishman attached to the Ulster Division expressed some surprise at the extreme care that was taken of the poor Major, though no Irish soldier expected anything else, for, after all, Ulstermen are Irish too.

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Father Willie Doyle of 8/Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed soon afterwards, enjoyed a reputation which went far beyond those who shared his faith. ‘Father Doyle was a good deal amongst us,’ wrote an Ulsterman.

We couldn’t possibly agree with his religious opinions, but we worshipped him for other things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he didn’t know what bigotry was. He was as ready to risk his life to take a drop of water to a wounded Ulsterman as to assist men of his own faith and regiment. If he risked his life looking after Ulster Protestant soldiers once, he did it a hundred times in the last few days. The Ulstermen felt his loss more keenly than anybody and none were readier to show their marks of respect to the dead hero priest than were our Ulster Presbyterians. Father Doyle was a true Christian in every sense of the word, and a credit to any religious faith …

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The stone tower that now stands in the Irish Peace Park on the southern end of Messines, heavy with Celtic symbolism, gives Protestant and Catholic soldiers the recognition they deserve: a recognition mired too long in politics.

The period between the raising of the 1st New Army in August 1914 and the departure of the first of the New Army divisions to France a year later was marked by shortages of weapons, equipment, accommodation and ammunition, and men remembered the sharp contrast between enthusiastic enlistment and the confusion and boredom that often followed. Even joining was not always easy, as Percy Croney discovered when he reported to the recruiting office in December 1914. ‘I took my place in the queue outside,’ he recalled.

Allowed in eight at a time by a smart sergeant, we stood in a row, stripped to the nude and a medical officer gave us a swift examination. The great majority seemed to be passed fit, and redressing we made our way to tables where soldier clerks sat.

‘What regiment do you wish to join?’

‘7th Essex, please, all my mates are in that.’

‘Sorry, 7th Essex is long ago up to establishment, why not join the R.E.s, much better pay and conditions than the infantry.’

‘No, I want to be a soldier.’

‘What about the Royal Field Artillery then, or the Garrison Artillery, a gunner’s life is good and interesting.’

‘No, I want to join my County regiment.’

He at last admitted that the 12th Battalion was not yet quite up to establishment, and I was seen out into the street again, the King’s shilling and 2/9d, one day’s subsistence money and pay rattling in my pocket, and holding in my hand a railway warrant to carry me to Warley Barracks on the morrow.

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The Rain brothers, trying to enlist in a regiment of their choice before conscription overwhelmed them in early 1917, found it even harder. They were too short for the Royal Marine Artillery. Rejected by a Territorial Royal Field Artillery battery at Islington, they went on to try RFA units at Moorgate and Camberwell ‘besides several others’. They managed to pass the medical at Woolwich and then ‘by means of tips’ secured a promise to be enlisted into the Royal Horse Artillery. But they turned out to be too young for that: and the Field Artillery there was full too. Eventually they struck lucky with the Queen’s Westminsters, even if the stew they were served for dinner was ‘so unwholesome that we were unable to eat it’. It was a happy choice, for their training battalion was still sending men to its 1st Battalion in France, and there was a real sense of family feeling and, by this stage in the war, no shortages of weapons or accommodation. Their company commander, Captain Gordon, ‘was an officer of exceptional popularity’, soon to be killed at Cambrai.

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Young Harry Ogle, still undecided about his future (which was in fact to see him go to the front as a private and return as a decorated captain), thought that:

A wave of fear seemed to have spread over the country and young men not in uniform were presented with white feathers by young women (also not in uniform). Men over forty, thinking themselves safe behind ‘important’ jobs, urged those to enlist who were too young to have anything to lose but their lives. The elderly and painfully religious couple whose lodger I was were cold to me, loudly praising Ted Pullen who, as the newspapers had it, had gallantly ‘placed his young life at the service of the Nation’. My fellow lodger, no less liable to military service than I was, openly asked me why I didn’t enlist. I answered nobody, for my own thoughts were forming.

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In September 1914 Clifford de Boltz was ‘accosted by a young lady in Great Portland Street’ and presented with a white feather. ‘I felt quite embarrassed,’ he admitted, ‘and threw the feather away in great disgust.’ But he enlisted in 2/6th Norfolk, a territorial cyclist battalion, soon afterwards. The battalion was already straining its resources, and he spent his first night in the army on a pub billiard table, and regretted that: ‘it went on like this for days and nobody seemed to know what to do next’. As his was a territorial battalion there was at least some uniform, but ‘whether it fitted or not did not seem to matter to them but we all felt very uncomfortable. Boots – asked for size 5. CQMS “we haven’t got any bloody boy’s boots, take these size 7 and wear three pairs of socks and you will be alright”.’

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Much depended on what men joined, and falling into the dark maw of a freshly-raised New Army unit, with few trained officers or NCOs, no proper accommodation, no clear sense of regional identity and pre-war kinship, was probably the worst fate. Bill Sugden told his future wife Amy on 28 October 1914: ‘Well, I’ve done it now and am a regular soldier in the RFA. I write in the Main Railway Station Sheffield having got my ticket for Newhaven and am proceeding there. I am afraid with all the excitement my hand is somewhat shaky.’

(#litres_trial_promo) On arrival he found that:

Everything is rough. The camp is like a quagmire, and no floor boards in the tent … Had a shave with difficulty and cold water. Truly last night I wished I was dead.

Sardines and bread for breakfast and we had to fight for it. The food is very roughly served. The other fellows have to eat their meat with their fingers which I would most certainly have to do was it not for my little darling’s knife and fork.

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Soon he was reporting that: ‘The life is harder than an outsider would believe,’ with incessant rain, wet blankets, and fatigues like peeling potatoes and emptying urinal buckets, ‘a rotten filthy job’. Press reports of German conduct in Belgium, though, filled him with anger and determination. ‘The outrages on women and children in Belgium have been terrible,’ he wrote. ‘Fancy if Amy had to fall into their hands … I only hope I shall have the chance to have a smash in return for the way our men have been treated, hands cut off and wounded shot.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Training seemed both pointless and brutal. ‘Our sergeant major is an absolute pig,’ he declared.

He swears and strikes the men … It is a cowardly thing to do as he knows the men dare not strike back … It makes my blood boil when I see it, and if he ever kicks or strikes me I shall go for him whatever the consequences and half kill him before they get me off … They seem to forget we have all given up our jobs to do our best for the country, and do not expect to be treated like a lot of rifraf.

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In November he wondered ‘why this Army is without system. If the names of 2 or 3 have to be called out they will have the whole regiment on parade for 2 hours. We are always waiting. Wait, wait, wait and always in the rain.’

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘All the men are keen to get on with their duty and it seems a dispiriting thing to me the way we are held back by silly fools of officers,’ he wrote on 1 December. ‘These men have bought their commissions. They are wealthy, brainless fools.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Things picked up when he was sent to Tynemouth for gun training, and when 21st Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery formed there he was already a trained signaller: ‘It’s quite a classy job and the best educated men are naturally picked out for it.’ He was promoted steadily, and in early 1917 announced from France that he was now ‘the only New Army man in the battery who has risen to the rank of sergeant … We have many regulars and I have been promoted over their heads.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Eventually selected for officer training, he was commissioned in April 1919.