Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

Other private soldiers echoed Bill Sugden’s chief complaints: bad living conditions and poor food, and training and discipline that seemed inappropriate for citizen soldiers eager to learn a new trade. And experienced officers admitted that it was difficult to make bricks without straw. Captain Rory Baynes, just back from the Royal West African Frontier Force, was sent off to train a New Army Cameronian battalion. His men were an odd mixture, with an early batch of ‘pretty rough’ unemployed, then a batch who had just given up their jobs, and then a good sprinkling of ex-NCOs. They had no rifles and drilled with broomsticks. ‘You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat,’ he wrote, ‘next to someone else in a red coat and some civilian trousers.’ He thought that the battalion had reached a reasonable standard by early 1915 when he was passed on the march by two companies of the regular 1/Cameronians and ‘saw immediately that our standard of NCOs and everything else was far below what it really should be’.

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J. B. Priestley was never altogether sure why he enlisted in 10/Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. ‘I was not hot with patriotic feeling,’ he admitted, and:

I did not believe that Britain was in any real danger. I was sorry for ‘gallant little Belgium’ but did not feel as if she was waiting for me to rescue her. The legend of Kitchener, who pointed out at us from every hoarding, had never captured me. I was not under any pressure from public opinion; the white feathers came later. I was not carried to the recruiting office in a herd of chums, nobody thinking, everybody half-plastered. I went alone.

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He shared the familiar misery of tented camps, ‘sleeping twelve to a bell-tent, kneeling after Lights Out to piss in our boots and then emptying them under the flap. The old soldiers told us that this was good for our boots, making them easier for route-marches’.

(#litres_trial_promo) And like so many New Army men he resented his Kitchener Blue, ‘a doleful convict-style blue outfit with a ridiculous little forage cap and a civilian overcoat’. But as khaki uniforms arrived, the weather improved and the battalion knitted together, he too felt the pride of arms which coursed through the New Armies in the spring of 1915. ‘We looked like soldiers now,’ he wrote.

All four battalions had a band; and along all the route we were waved at and cheered, not foolishly either, for an infantry brigade marching in full equipment with its bands booming and clashing is an impressive spectacle. This was my idea of soldiering – constant movement, unknown destinations, fluttering handkerchiefs and cheers – and I enjoyed it hugely, sore feet and bully beef and trips on hard ground and all.

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Although he would later blame his sense of class consciousness on the war, Priestley still spoke up warmly for the New Armies in their prime: they were emphatically not ‘a kind of brave rabble’. But it was not until the summer of 1916 that this promising amalgam of diverse humanity was ready to take the field, and even then inherent weaknesses caused by its rapid growth were too ready to make themselves evident.

Not all the flesh and blood required by the burgeoning army was human, however. The army needed huge quantities of horses. In 1914 it sent a strong cavalry division to France, with almost 10,000 horses, and each of the infantry divisions required nearly 6,000 to pull its guns and wagons and to mount its senior officers. There were 25,000 horses on the army’s strength in August 1914, and at least another 120,000 were required to meet immediate demands. Because the army’s peacetime requirement for horses was so small, Britain had no state breeding programme, but bought about a thousand horses a year from the trade. Most cavalry horses were ‘of hunter stamp. Height 15.2 hands, cost £40 in Ireland, a black gelding’. The Household Cavalry needed something bigger, ‘A real nice-looking heavyweight horse with plenty of bone,’ which was likely to cost £65 as a four year old.

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The Boer War had already shown that the army could not hope to rely on normal commercial channels to obtain horses on mobilisation, and in 1914 its purchasing officers were equipped with justice’s warrants which entitled them to obtain horses by compulsory purchase. Most tried to pay sensible sums (£70 was the guideline for an officer’s charger), neither overspending nor robbing the sellers. B. E. Todhunter mounted B Squadron of the Essex Yeomanry, travelling over 900 miles to get all the horses he required. ‘Essex has been pretty well skinned of her horses,’ he told the remount officer in Brentwood on 14 August, ‘and I had to go poaching in Suffolk before I could get the six I sent you yesterday.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But not all purchasing officers were as astute. Irish dealers unloaded some questionable stock, 12 percent of which had to be sold on immediately as unsuitable.

Many private individuals, hunt stables and corporations gave up their horses voluntarily. The historian of 11th Hussars recorded that: ‘Colonel Pitman’s brother sent eight hunters all of which came through the war successfully. The master of the Meynell Hunt sent a number of hunt horses, and others came from Mr Fernie’s and the Pytchley.’ Weymouth Corporation was so generous with its omnibus horses that there were too few left to pull the buses. But most horses were compulsorily purchased. Captain James Jack of the Cameronians had already been mobilised when he heard that his two remaining hunters, ‘Ardskull Boy and Home Park, have been taken for the army – the first war wrench’. When remount sergeants visited the Buckinghamshire village of Tysoe in August: ‘Every farmhouse … had some shock and grief that day.’ Kathleen Ashby’s family lost their much-loved aged carthorse Captain, who was still useful ‘if you humoured him and knocked off promptly after his stint of work, but under new men and at hard tasks he must break down’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The disappearance of Sammy and Rob Roy, Titan and Jupiter, cast an early shadow over a land still unused to loss, and some families, proud that their boys should go, could not bear to lose their animals. Three Lancashire children, ‘troubled little Britishers’, wrote to ‘Dear good Lord Kitchener’ with a picture of their pony and begged that she might be spared. Two others had already gone, and three of the family were ‘now fighting for you in the Navy. Mother and I will do anything for you, but do, do please let us keep old Betty.’ Kitchener’s private secretary, no less, immediately replied that he had spoken to Kitchener and ‘if you show the enclosed note to anyone who asks about your pony he thinks it will be left to you quite safely’.

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Newly-purchased horses went to remount depots where officers entitled to a charger could take their pick. James Pennycuik of the Royal Engineers tells how:

An enormous horse depot was formed at the Curragh racecourse to hold wonderful animals requisitioned from all over … Ireland, a sight never to be forgotten in that green land of horses. We young officers had great fun picking our requirements, and it was a great time for anyone with an eye for a horse.

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Henry Owens, a hunting doctor instantly commissioned into the RAMC, collected ‘a nice horse, a long-tailed bay, well bred, nice mouth and manners and nice paces’.

(#litres_trial_promo) And Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards secured ‘one Umslopagaas, a powerful weight-carrying hunter with a wall eye, who could jump railway gates’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The unlucky Private Garrod, however, lost his favourite horse, who had to be destroyed when she broke a leg, and was allocated the worst horse in the troop, ‘who was such a bastard that he was known as Syphilis’ because nobody wanted to catch him. He kicked out and broke the farrier sergeant major’s arm when the horses were being embarked at Southampton, and then reared back ‘over the dock into the water and was never seen again’.

By June 1915, long before it began to conscript men, the army had taken 8 percent of the heavy horses in use on the land, and 25 percent of saddle horses had gone from farms. At one point in 1917 the army had nearly a million animals on its strength, with 436,000 of them in France. It is small wonder that fodder was, by a narrow margin, the heaviest single item shipped to France, heavier even than ammunition. The pressing need to supply and feed horses helped break down the barriers that had hitherto kept women, apart from nurses, out of uniform. The Women’s Forage Corps, which had 6,000 members by 1918, worked at baling and transporting hay, and the Women’s Remount Depot played a valuable part in breaking in newly-bought horses. There were the inevitable suggestions that women would not be up to the heavy work, but, in the event, they did it very well, freeing men for military service. Edith Maudslay, a farmer’s daughter, joined the Women’s Remount Depot in 1915, worried about her gunner brother (reported missing in March 1918 after returning alone to his battery’s gun-line to try to amend the day’s fortunes with his revolver), and lived on to drive an ambulance in the London Blitz in the Second World War.

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