Читать книгу Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front - Richard Holmes - Страница 14

In one sense there was not really a single British army in the First World War, more a collection of regiments, drawn together in loose association into brigades and divisions which had personalities of their own. As we look at infantry battalions across the best part of a century we might be tempted to assume that the Old Army 1/Grenadier Guards had much in common with the territorial 4/Queen’s or the New Army 11/East Lancashire. To be sure, on one level they did look alike. All were commanded by lieutenant colonels, had four companies, and formed part of brigades which had four battalions apiece. But on another they had different histories, traditions, compositions, attitudes and aptitudes. Although the remorseless corrosion of casualties meant that, especially after mid-1916, these characters began to change, this was an army which, start to finish, revelled in an extraordinary diversity.

There were allegedly rurally-recruited regiments which marched past to A Farmer’s Boy and cultivated close contact with the county’s gentry, but actually drew their strength from mean streets and smoky factories. There was a single battery of artillery which shot two of its soldiers for striking a superior, and whole regiments which shot only enemies. One cavalry private always called his troop sergeant ‘Charlie’: in another regiment such flippancy might have seen him strung up to a wagon wheel for two hours a day. There were Englishmen who wore the kilt with all the panache of a native-born Highlander; a much-wounded Belgian, Adrian Carton de Wiart, who won the VC as a British officer; and an ex-Boer guerrilla, Denys Reitz, who commanded a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers.

There were some officers who would have fitted comfortably into a Wellingtonian mess: and others who might have sold the great duke his coal. And then there were ex-officers who served as private soldiers because they had no other way of getting to the front. Arthur Arnold Crow resigned his captaincy in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment because of ill-health in 1916. When he recovered he found that he could not regain his commission without giving up hope of foreign service: he enlisted and was killed as a private in the Essex Regiment in 1917. J. B. Osborne, invalided out as a lieutenant, rejoined as a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and was killed in October 1918. And the Hon. M. F. S. Howard, son of the 9th Earl of Carlisle and once a lieutenant in the 18th Hussars, died as a private at Passchendaele, and has no known grave. There were ex-privates who commanded battalions, ex-convicts honoured with His Majesty’s commission, sexagenarians who soldiered on and boys, like Private Reginald Giles of 1/Gloucesters, killed on the Somme at the age of fourteen, who died in the trenches when they should have been at school.

Reality sometimes confounded expectation. Some veterans argued that the territorial 5th Scottish Rifles was more reliable than one of the regular battalions of the same regiment. Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, who went to war as a regular lieutenant in the Royal Berkshires in 1914 and commanded a Berkshire battalion at Passchendaele three years later, reckoned that most temporary officers were good as long as their units were well commanded, and ‘many were better than regulars’.¹ One officer with the rare combination of Distinguished Conduct Medal (won as a corporal in South Africa) and Military Cross (won as an officer on the Western Front) was never a professional soldier, but fitted both conflicts into a long and successful career as a tea planter in India. Sidney Farmer MM, seventeen times wounded, with a record that many a regular might have been proud of, served only for the duration of the war. After it, like so many others, he returned to the community from which he had sprung, running the Golden Lion in the Herefordshire town of Knighton, though troubled by the occasional appearance of shrapnel which travelled down his body to emerge from his feet.²

Although the casualties of the Somme created a demand for reinforcements which helped blur many old distinctions, British regiments remained resolutely different. The Grenadiers, the senior regiment of foot guards, trace their origins back to the Low Countries in the 1650s, when they were formed to guard Charles II, and in consequence have an enduring rivalry with the Coldstream Guards, who trace their descent from General George Monck’s (Parliamentarian) Regiment of Foot. Three regular battalions strong in 1914, the Grenadiers raised a 4th battalion during the war. As one of the regiment’s historians observed, ‘they did not have a monopoly of discipline, smartness and professionalism in the BEF, but as an elite they did believe in the highest standards in all three, believe in them, demand them and maintain them whatever might be the circumstances and whatever the cost’.³ A regimental history written forty years before the war had suggested that:

The soldier in the hour of need and danger will ever be more ready to follow the officer and gentleman whom education, position in life, and accident of birth point out to be his natural leader … than the man who, by dint of study and brainwork, has raised himself (much to his own credit, certainly) from the plough or the anvil. In no profession should the feeling of noblesse oblige be more recognised than in the army …⁴

Noblesse indeed: one of the marked social changes in the army of the nineteenth century was that noblemen, once scattered widely across the army, had tended to concentrate in the Foot Guards and Household Cavalry. Of course there were exceptions. Major Christopher de Sausmarez, a peer’s nephew, commanded 108th Heavy Battery Royal Garrison Artillery in 1914, and a baronet led one of his sections of two 60-pounder guns. The RGA had many distinctions but social exclusivity was not one of them, and a heavy battery gun-line was unfamiliar earth for sprigs of nobility. In 1914 the Grenadiers’ officers included Lieutenant Colonel Lord Brabazon, Major the Hon. Hubert Crichton, Captain Lord Guernsey, and Captain Lord Francis Montagu-Douglas-Scott. It was as understandable that Raymond Asquith, the prime minister’s son who would die on the Somme, should join the Grenadiers as it was that the Prince of Wales should do the same. The officers

all knew one another well; many, like Lord Bernard Gordon-Lennox, had married the sister of a brother officer (in this case Lord Loch); and many, like George Cecil, had succeeded their father in the regiment or, like Eben Pike or Bernard Gordon-Lennox again, were succeeded by their sons and grandsons.⁵

These ripples widened across the Household Division as a whole, as Rowland Feilding, then a captain in the Coldstream, discovered when he did his first tour of trench duty in May 1915.

On either side of me I found relations. On my immediate left Percy Clive [a cousin] commanded a company of Grenadiers, and the Coldstream company on my right was commanded by Rollo [another cousin]. I visited Percy at 4.30 on the morning after our arrival. The last time I had seen him was at dinner in the House of Commons, and I was very glad to meet him again. While I was shaving, Rollo brought Henry Feilding [yet another cousin] to see me. He is with a squadron of King Edward’s Horse, which is acting as Divisional Cavalry to a Territorial Division near here, and was paying a visit to Rollo in the trenches.

Rollo (later Lieutenant Colonel Viscount Feilding) survived the war. Captain Percy Clive MP was killed on 5 April 1918, and Captain the Hon. Henry Feilding died of wounds on 11 October 1917.⁶

Nor was this sense of identity confined to the officers. There were Grenadier families amongst the rank and file, and the warrant officers’ and sergeants’ mess was held together by bonds no less powerful than those which linked members of the officers’ mess. It might take a guardsman two years to get his first promotion, and he would be lucky to make sergeant in less than ten. A regimental sergeant major’s tour of duty was five years, and it was not unknown for Guards RSMs to ask for extensions, arguing that there was still more to be done with the battalion.⁷

The Grenadiers had a tangible quality, even to its rivals. Its soldiers were nicknamed Bill-Browns, as opposed to the Coalies, Jocks, Micks and Taffs of the other foot guards regiments. Private Stephen Graham, an educated man serving in the ranks of the Scots Guards, saw the Grenadiers assault stoutly-held German defences at the very end of the war.

There were heavy losses suffered there by the attackers, especially by the Bill-Browns, whose discipline, courage and fame committed them then, as ever, to doing the impossible in human heroism and endurance. I lost a whole series of comrades or friends wounded or killed. C—, who had filled up a blank file with me in Little Sparta, was killed; S—, recruited from the S.E. Railway, a jolly, happy middle-aged man, who always hailed me as Steve and had a cheery word, was killed. H—, the American boy who used to dance all night at New York was wounded.⁸

In contrast, 4/Queen’s was a territorial battalion of the Queen’s Regiment, with a regular adjutant, regimental sergeant major and small permanent staff of regular NCOs: its other members were civilians, who soldiered in their spare time. It originated in a company of rifle volunteers formed at Croydon in 1859 in response to the threat of French invasion which had Tennyson earnestly declaiming ‘Form, riflemen: riflemen, form …’. A second company was added in 1860 to form the 1st Surrey Administrative Battalion; this became the 2nd Surrey Rifle Volunteers seven years later and the 1st Volunteer Battalion the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment in 1881. It sent a company of five officers and 200 men to the Boer War, and in 1908 it was swept up in R. B. Haldane’s creation of the Territorial Force to become 4th (Territorial) Battalion The Queen’s Regiment, swapping its rifle-green uniforms for the scarlet of the line. Its historian suggested that it was the first territorial battalion to receive colours, presented by Lady Eldridge and Mrs Frank Watney, the wife of the commanding officer – a prominent local brewer when not engaged in his military duties.

Its men trained on weekday drill nights, one weekend each month and at a fortnight’s annual camp. There were perennial problems in ensuring that employers gave men time off for camp, and compromises between day job and military identity meant that in the battalion’s first year, 22 officers and 418 men attended the first week of camp at Brighton but only 13 officers and 241 men the second. In 1914 it found itself at camp, marching from Bordon to Salisbury Plain as part of a large territorial exercise, when war broke out. Mobilised on 5 August, it was sent to Chattenden, near Chatham. Like other territorial battalions it split, forming a first-line battalion, 1/4th, which rapidly departed for India, where it spent the whole war, seeing active service on the North-West Frontier. A second line, 2/4th, which included some men from the 1st Battalion who had not volunteered for foreign service and some wartime volunteers, eventually fought on the Western Front in 1918.

The third-line, 3/4th Queen’s, containing officers and men from the other two battalions as well as wartime recruits, spent much of its war in southern England. In December 1914, D Company was billeted on the premises of Caleys, the court dressmakers, in Windsor High Street when a fire broke out: the lights failed, but men of the company escorted the seamstresses out of the dark and smoke-filled building, earning a fulsome letter of thanks from Mr Hugh Caley, the managing director, and less formal expressions of gratitude from the ladies. The battalion always had an easy style. When it was billeted in Reigate in January 1916 an earnest (though wisely anonymous) well-wisher told his commanding officer that:

Refering (sic) to the health and cleanliness of this Battalion which has been very well kept up in the past, I must add that a certain Company are allowed to get dirty owing to the inconveniences of Local Baths going wrong. This Company has a bath room and are not allowed to use it. Trusting that this will soon be remedied.

I remain

Yours obediently⁹

Private Richard Whatley persuaded his brother, a driver in the Army Service Corps, to apply to join the battalion, whether because of a genuine desire for life in the infantry or because he was in France and 3/4th was in Reigate it is impossible to say. Driver Whatley’s letter was written in pencil and sent in a green official envelope which meant that it was not subject to censorship within his unit – a wise precaution as its contents might not have been regarded as a vote of confidence in his current management.

5/6/16

Dear Sir

I, Driver J. Whatley (T/94354) No 1 Company 4th Divisional Train A.S.C. British Expeditionary Force, France, take the great liberty of writing these lines to you in reference of my brother Private Richard Whatley (23729) B Company of your most noble regiment. I take the liberty of asking you if you could transfer me to the same regiment as that of what my brother belongs & also to the Same Company as I wish to soldier with him if it is at all possible as I think that it would be to our own advantage as well as that of the most noble Country we are fighting for. My enlistment age is 25 7/12 years but my proper age is 18 7/12 years. I enlisted in May 1915, & my height about 5:6 or 7 inches & chest measurement just over 30 inches. Any more details I would be very pleased to send you, & hoping that I am not trespassing on your valuable time I close my short letter & remain

Your Umble Servant

Driver J Whatley¹⁰

The battalion at last went to the Western Front in 1917. It fought its one major battle at Zonnebeke in the Ypres salient on 4 October: all the twenty officers who attacked that day were killed or wounded, and so much of the fabric so carefully nurtured over two years was torn apart for ever. The commanding officer’s typewritten list of officers and their next of kin bears repeated manuscript annotations showing killed and wounded. The same list reveals that by the time it went to France the battalion was already losing its regional character: only fifteen of its forty-four officers actually had next of kin in Surrey although there was a clear majority from south London and the Home Counties. There were two Irishmen, a Cornishman, and the padre (who already had a MC and was to add a DSO at Zonnebeke) hailed from Newcastle. Most of the Surrey contingent came, like the commanding officer, from Croydon, and 3/4th Queen’s enjoyed a warm relationship with the borough, whose citizens ‘continued, as in the past, to take a great interest in the doings of this battalion … and among other benefits given, the receipt each Christmas in England and abroad of puddings and tobacco was much appreciated by the battalion’. Christmas 1917 was the battalion’s last. It had turned over in killed, wounded and missing almost as many officers and men as had arrived in France seven months before (a worse casualty rate over such a short time than was sustained by some regular battalions), and was disbanded in February 1918, its soldiers posted off to other battalions.¹¹

Lastly, 11/East Lancashire, proudly known as the Accrington Pals, was a New Army (properly ‘Service’) battalion, raised in late August and early September 1914 as a result of the mayor of Accrington’s communication with the War Office, which accepted his offer of a locally-raised battalion. Recruiters set to work in Accrington, Burnley, Blackburn and Chorley, and all the powerful links within these bustling communities accelerated the process. For instance, H. D. Riley of Hawks House, Brierfield, Burnley, mill-owner and justice of the peace, had founded the Burnley Lads’ Club for working-class boys in 1905: it had a library and reading room, and offered wide sporting opportunities. On 19 September Riley placed an advertisement in the Burnley Express, announcing that a Lads’ Club Company was to be formed. Riley and seventy ex-members of the club enlisted the following Wednesday. There were not enough to form a full company, but the club members became part of D (Burnley and Blackburn) Company.

At this stage officers were nominated by the mayor, and Riley (hitherto without military experience) first became a lieutenant and the company’s second in command, rising to captain and company commander a few days later. An eyewitness described how the company first formed.

Miners, mill-hands, office-boys, black-coats, bosses, schoolboys and masters, found themselves appearing before Mr Ross and the medical officer. Young men who should have been tied to their mother’s apron-strings took home their first service pay – 1/9d in coppers – and nearly broke their mothers’ hearts. Men of mature age, patriotic or sensing adventure or to escape from monotony were ready to have a go at anyone who should pull the lion’s tail. The thing was done! 350 men of good spirit and willing in body assembled in the Drill Hall to be patiently told how to ‘form fours’.¹²

There were few trained officers or NCOs. Colonel Sharpies, the commanding officer, was sixty-four, and had joined the Rifle Volunteers over forty years before. RSM Stanton was sixty years old, had once chased the Sioux with George Custer, fought the Zulus and the Boers, and left the army in 1905; in 1914 this old soldier answered the call for trained men, and he was to die of natural causes the following year. Most of the officers were the sons of prominent citizens, and included one of the mayor of Accrington’s grandsons. There was a sprinkling of ex-regulars among the NCOs, but most had no military experience, and many were promoted before they even had uniforms to sew their stripes to.

A. S. Durrant, who joined a New Army battalion of the Durham Light Infantry at just this time, recalled that:

I was sergeant six weeks after I joined up. You see, Kitchener’s Army was being built up, anybody with half a brain of common sense could get one stripe in no time. Your 2 stripes, 3 stripes. I tell you I was first a private and then a sergeant and I was put in charge of a hut.¹³

To the inexperienced young were added the all-too-veteran old, as Lancelot Spicer discovered when he joined a New Army battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He found that:

All the men were in civilian clothes and all we had for training were wooden rifles. Apart from the officers, the only ones in uniform were a few non-commissioned officers who were regulars. The Commanding Officer was Lt. Col. Holland, a retired Indian Army officer … a pleasant enough old boy, but his soldiering appeared to us young raw recruits to be of the Indian Mutiny — in battalion parades he would ask in a loud voice. ‘Mr Butler [the adjutant], how many white officers on parade?’¹⁴

The Accringtons were sent to Carnarvon in early 1915, and Colonel Sharpies was quickly replaced as commanding officer by a regular, Major (temporary Lieutenant Colonel) A. W. Rickman of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Rickman immediately made a good impression, as Lieutenant Rawcliffe observed:

We were brought up to attention as Colonel Rickman rode up the street towards us. He had to pass a motor-lorry parked outside a shop. This narrowed the street and his horse shied. We all thought it was going through the shop window. Colonel Rickman beat the horse hard with his stick … to make it pass the motor-lorry. What a real display of strength and will-power. What an entrance! I thought, we’re in for it now!¹⁵

Private Pollard agreed. ‘He was very smart, a true professional,’ he declared. ‘We were looking at a real soldier for the first time. We knew he would sort us out.’¹⁶

The battalion, in khaki uniforms which had replaced its original blue melton, spent much of 1915 on the move, from Rugely to Ripon, from Ripon to Larkhill and then, in December, to Devonport for the voyage to Egypt. It spent three undemanding months guarding the Suez canal before being sent to Marseilles for its railway journey to the Western Front. Part of 31st Division, it was allocated a leading role on the first day of the Somme, assaulting the village of Serre at the northern end of 4th Army’s line.

What happened to the Accringtons that morning was to be matched in so many other places further down the front. The men went over the top, after shaking hands and wishing each other good luck, to find uncut wire, intact machine guns and a creeping barrage which they could never catch. Lance Corporal Marshall watched the destruction of his battalion and the changing of his world:

I saw many men fall back into the trench as they attempted to climb out. Those of us who managed had to walk two yards apart, very slowly, then stop, then walk again, and so on. We all had to keep in a line. Machine-gun bullets were sweeping backwards and forwards and hitting the ground around our feet. Shells were bursting everywhere. I had no special feeling of fear and I knew that we must all go forward until wounded or killed. There was no going back. Captain Riley fell after thirty yards … the message passed down the line, from man to man – ‘Captain Riley has been killed.’¹⁷

The Official History, its prose rising nobly to meet the occasion, reported that the attackers in this sector, pals’ battalions from Hull, Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Durham and Sheffield, continued to advance even after the German SOS barrage crashed down.

There was no wavering or attempting to come back. The men fell in their ranks, mostly before the first hundred yards of No Man’s Land had been crossed. The magnificent gallantry, discipline and determination shown by all ranks of this North Country division were of no avail against the concentrated fire effect of the enemy’s unshaken infantry and artillery, whose barrage has been described as so consistent and severe that the cones of the explosions gave the impression of a thick belt of poplar trees.¹⁸

The German defensive barrage briefly switched to Serre itself. This may have been because the gunners knew some of the attackers had actually got that far. Skeletons in khaki rags were found there when the Germans pulled back from the village in 1917: some bore tarnished brass shoulder titles which read ‘EAST LANCASHIRE’. The Accringtons lost 7 officers and 139 men killed, 2 officers and 88 men missing, believed killed, and 12 officers and 336 men wounded.¹⁹ The battalion remained on the Western Front for the rest of the war, and while avoiding the disbandments of early 1918, and the fate which befell 3/4th Queen’s, it was never the same as it had been at 7.30 on the morning of 1 July 1916. And neither, for that matter, was Accrington, which had lost too many of its dearest and its best that day.

These three battalions were not simply different in origin, tradition and composition. They behaved differently, in the line and out of it. The relations between their officers and men were different, and their approach to the war was different too. Second Lieutenant P. J. Campbell was appointed artillery liaison officer to a Grenadier battalion in 1917 and joined it in the trenches. Its commanding officer asked whether he had been to Eton and whether he was a regular: on receiving a negative answer to both questions:

He appeared to take no further interest in me as a person, but I was impressed by him and what I saw that night. The discipline of the Guards was very strict and their behaviour even in the line very formal … The Grenadier Guards went out, an English county regiment came in, and the difference was perceptible immediately. There was an atmosphere of warm-hearted banter, cheerful inefficiency; packs and gas-masks, revolvers and field-glasses were thrown about anyhow. Now we were all civilians who hated war, but knew that it had to be fought and would go on fighting until it was won.²⁰

Major Charles Ward Jackson, an Etonian and Yeomanry officer serving on the staff, made the same point in a letter to his wife in June 1916. Some battalions seemed good enough.

But we had not seen the Guards. You never saw such a difference. In the first place the officers all looked like gentlemen, and the men twice the size, and in the second their discipline is extraordinary. Different altogether from other regulars. Not a man sits down as you pass, no matter how far off you may be.²¹

Soldiers from other regiments who failed to salute properly as the Guards Division passed on the march were arrested and taken with it. At the day’s end they were interviewed, had the error of their ways pointed out, and were invited to return whence they had come. Saluting improved for miles around. The Old Army’s discipline could survive stern shocks. In the chaos following the battle of Le Cateau in August 1914, Lieutenant Roland Brice Miller, a regular officer in 123rd Battery Royal Field Artillery, described how:

A private soldier of the Bedfordshire Regiment, grey with fatigue, approached me, came smartly to the slope [-arms] and slapped the butt of his rifle in salute. ‘Can you tell me a good position to retire to?’ he asked. One man!²²

A battalion like 3/4th Queen’s or the Accrington Pals was perfectly capable of laying on a smart formal parade, and there was a latent dandyism in many soldiers that found military ritual perversely satisfying. But guardee smartness was not their concern, and their discipline continued to reflect pre-war relationships. Private Bewsher of the Accringtons remembered that his company sergeant major, revolver in hand, had checked the shelters in the front-line trench for laggards before the attack on 1 July. ‘He had no need to do that,’ complained Bewsher. ‘All the lads were ready to go.’²³ And while the regulars accepted robust discipline as a matter of course, territorials and New Army men, far more conscious of what they had once been, and, God willing, would be once again, were far less prepared to tolerate its more extreme manifestations such as Field Punishment No. 1.²⁴

Sergeant Jock Chrystal of the Northumberland Hussars, a Yeomanry (territorial cavalry) regiment, reproved by his RSM, told his officer that he resented the rebuke. ‘Now, Sor, did ye ivvor hear such cheek?’ he asked. ‘Him, Halliday, a Sergeant-Major jaist, an’ me, the Duke’s Forester, talkin’ to me that way?’²⁵ It was not a remark which would have gone down well in the Grenadiers.

The different identities of regular, territorial and New Army units were blurred, though rarely wholly obscured, but casualties and the sheer caprice of battle meant that some units survived the war with their identity intact while others lost it relatively quickly. Captain James Dunn, that ‘doctor with a DSO, and much unmedalled merit’ who compiled the history of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, recorded his unit’s evolution as its regular content steadily diminished. In early 1915 there were still enough old sweats about to delight the corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, when he inspected the battalion: ‘He chatted and chaffed, pinched their arms and ears, asked how many children they had, asked if they could be doing with leave to get another … When it was over he said to the GOC, “That’s been a treat. That’s the sort we’ve known for thirty years.”’²⁶ Dunn reckoned that the battalion then had about 250 originals left, mainly in transport, drums, signals and amongst the NCOs. But by the summer of 1918 he admitted ‘we were a regular battalion in name only’.²⁷ This is scarcely surprising, for the battalion suffered 1,107 killed, and four times as many wounded, amongst its non-commissioned personnel during its four years on the Western Front, getting through the whole of its 1914 establishment strength five times over. It was actually luckier than the New Army 10/Royal Welch Fusiliers, which lost 756 soldiers killed in only two and a half years at the front.

The Royal Welch Fusilier regimental depot at Litherland held officers and men from the regular, territorial and New Army battalions of the regiment, who had come from hospitals, long courses or recruiting offices. As Second Lieutenant Lloyd Evans discovered in 1916:

They would be sifted and trained, and detailed singly or in batches to all fronts where Battalions of the Regiment were serving. In the huge mess were officers who had served with one or more of these battalions. There were ‘returned heroes’, so I thought of them, from the First and Second. Some struck me as being really heroic. Others were the talkative sort who worked to impress on ‘these Service Battalion fellows’ that ‘of course it was somewhat different in the Regular Battalions’.

He had mixed feelings about being posted to the 2nd Battalion because ‘it used up subalterns by the dozen’, but found himself very happy in it.²⁸

During the process of drafting the Welsh content of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers seems to have increased. There had been a substantial Birmingham contingent in the pre-war battalion which led to outsiders, careless of their dentistry, calling it ‘The Brummagem Fusiliers’, and Captain Robert Graves recalled his CSM, a Birmingham man, giving a stern talking-to to a German prisoner caught with pornographic postcards in his pack. Dunn observed that a July 1917 draft comprising largely young South Wales Miners was ‘much the best that has come to us of two years’. Nonetheless, only 37 percent of the battalion was Welsh-born.²⁹

A survey of another regular battalion, 2/Durham Light Infantry, makes the same point. It mobilised at Whittington Barracks, Lichfield, in 1914, and took 27 officers and 1,000 men to France. A single day that September cost it more men than the entire Boer War, and during the whole of the First World War it suffered 5,313 casualties, which included 30 officers and 1,306 men killed.³⁰ The 2/Green Howards lost 1,442 officers and men killed in the war, 704 of them regulars, regular reservists or members of the Special Reserve. Of these experienced soldiers who were to be killed in the war just over half were killed in 1915, and over three-quarters had died by the end of that year.³¹ Ralph L. Mottram, driving across the Somme back area in 1916, ‘overtook an infantry regiment that bore my badge, and I looked in vain for any face I could recognise. But from out the ranks of the rear company rose a cheer, and I found that a few knew me. It was my own battalion, nearly all strangers …’.³²

The pre-war regular infantryman who fought on the Somme was relatively uncommon, and the one who fought at Passchendaele was rarer still. But somehow battalions which the Army List described as regular did their best to behave like regulars. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor in the Second World War, was medical officer to 1/Royal Fusiliers in the First. He noticed how: ‘The battalion kept changing, seven colonels came and went and I could never school myself to grow indifferent to these gaps.’³³ The battalion was sorely tried on the Somme, but as it came out of the line:

On the road we passed a Kitchener Battalion going up, they were resting by the roadside.

‘Them’s the First,’ one of them remarked, and the men hearing the words straightened up and covered off.³⁴

The first three armies that fought on the Western Front – Old, New and Territorial – were founded on voluntary recruiting. No less than 5,704,416 men – about a quarter of the adult male population of the United Kingdom – passed through the army during the war. Just under half, 2,446,719, were volunteers, and the remainder were conscripted by one of a series of Military Service Acts. The first came into force on 27 January 1916 and the vice was progressively tightened as the war went on.

The conscript army had no separate identity. The majority of its soldiers were infantry: the infantry was easily the largest single arm on the Western Front, and suffered the highest casualty rate of any major branch of the army.³⁵ Its soldiers were trained in the United Kingdom in battalions which, from the summer of 1916, steadily lost any genuine regimental identity: the 12th (Reserve) Battalion of the Welch Regiment became the 58th Training Reserve Battalion, the 230th (Graduated) Battalion and eventually the 51st (Graduated) Battalion of the South Wales Borderers.³⁶ As we have already seen, soldiers were trained wearing one cap badge, and then rebadged, as the demands of the front required, in the infantry base depots at Etaples. The regional identity of units in the other three armies was steadily eroded also. This reduced the damage done to British communities which had been such a feature of the early stages of the Somme, but it deprived battalions of some of the bonds which had linked their members in the past.

It is not surprising that the decline of regional recruiting affronted members of the Old Army. Company Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard of 1/Dorsets, as regimental as the proverbial button-stick, wrote on 21 August 1916:

In the evening a lot of our old hands now attached to 2nd Wilts (who are in billets just over the bridge) came to see us. They are terribly upset on account of having to serve with the Wilts (some of them are men slightly wounded on July 1st) and they went to see our Adjt to ask whether they could not come back to their own regiments. Adjt promised to apply for them, but it will be useless. Why the responsible authorities do these things I cannot imagine. If a certain Regt is required to be reinforced quickly and none of their own are available, the matter is explained. But we well know that after our smash on July 1st strong reinforcements were sent for us, and on arrival at the Base they were diverted, some to 2nd Wilts, some to Hampshires, etc., and we received men of Hampshires as reinforcements instead of our own. And so the merry game goes on. Some big pot is drawing a large salary for such muddling work as this, ruining the one thing which has kept our army going so well, i.e. ‘Pride of Regiment’, ‘Esprit de Corps’.³⁷

The 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers had its losses in the fighting at High Wood on the Somme made up by 540 reinforcements, volunteers and conscripts, many ‘unlikely to stay the more exacting rigours of service in the field’. There were Cheshires, Shropshires and South Wales Borderers, who, as Captain James Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers wrote, ‘arrived restful of their transfer and resented by us’.³⁸ An old soldier of 1/Black Watch, widely known as Black Jock, returned to his battalion after being wounded. He was soon posted as a deserter: it transpired that he had deserted from Etaples to get back to his battalion, fearing that he might be sent amongst strangers. And his battalion, knowing well that tartan was stronger than regulations, duly expunged the ‘crime’.

The war’s voracious appetite for infantry led to soldiers from other arms being compulsorily transferred. This led to difficulties because, for instance, well-qualified private soldiers in the Royal Engineers drew more pay than sergeants in the infantry. Sapper George Swinford records that in mid-1916:

I passed all my exams in sapping, mining, knots and lashings, demolitions and bridge building, and was waiting to go to the River Conway to do pontoon bridging which was the last thing. Then on Sunday morning notices were put up that every man in the camp was to be on parade at ten o’clock … away we all went to Kenmel Park where were attached to the Royal Welch Fusiliers.³⁹

News that the sappers were entitled to extra pay unsurprisingly caused bad feelings amongst the infantry sergeants, ‘who said that they would make us earn it’. After large-scale collective absenteeism, which produced a week’s worth of trials, Private (as he now was) Swinford was rebadged again and sent to France, where he joined 11/South Lancashire, spending the rest of the war with that battalion.

Sometimes the process of assimilation was rough. Norman Gladden joined 7/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers on the Somme in September 1916. ‘To add to our discomforts,’ he recalled, The new draft was received by the battalion without ceremony or any sort of induction. We were absorbed by our company like bodies being sucked down into a morass and made to feel as if we had no rights at all.

Posted to 11/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers a year later when he returned to the front after being invalided home, he was much happier: the Lewis gunners he joined were ‘a likeable group, who made me feel at home straight away’.⁴⁰ Often the new policy worked better than many old sweats would have expected. Men needed the sense of belonging, and battalions which took the trouble to make new arrivals feel welcome usually reaped the benefit. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Segrave, who commanded 1/15th London Regiment until promoted to command a brigade in August 1918, made a point of shaking hands with all new arrivals, regardless of rank, and left a first-rate battalion to his successor, Rowland Feilding, who immediately told his wife:

They are like little lions – these London men … The standard of courage among these London lads is so high that men who would be considered brave elsewhere do not seem particularly brave here.⁴¹

In contrast, Corporal Clifford de Boltz, posted to 1/Norfolk in France from 2/6th Norfolk, a cyclist battalion, found his draft ‘given some rations and told to lie in a field for the night’. They ‘gradually merged into the Regt.’⁴²

We cannot even tell to which regiment Percy Smith was posted in 1917, but we do know that he was not happy when he arrived in France. On 18 September he told his family that: ‘if the relatives and wives of us boys knew the real state of affairs out here they would worry more and more and most likely there would be an unrest in the country’, and he prayed his brother Vic might be spared his fate. But he was proud of his battalion:

The Regiment I am in is a fighting Regt & we are always on the move we never stay at one place long, it was the first Regt out here when war was declared & we have some fine fellows. Fritz sure knows when we are about.⁴³

Frederick Hodges attended Northampton Grammar School, and followed the fortunes of older boys and masters who had joined the army: one came home ‘full of shrapnel … We were thrilled.’ Hodges was later ‘amazed how attractive all this information about the war was to under-age boys … One thing was certain … we must, we MUST be fit, so that we would pass A1 when the long awaited day came’.⁴⁴ He joined the Northamptons in July 1917, and was sent to France, with so many other eighteen year olds, in the crisis following the German offensive of March 1918. On arrival in France:

We were lined up in a very long single line. We were then counted off into groups destined for different battalions. Friends who stood in line next to one another were parted by a hand and an order, and marched off to different Regimental Base Headquarters. There were bell tents in a long line, where particulars were taken, and to our surprise, new regimental numbers were given to us …

In this peremptory way, I and about 300 others suddenly became Lancashire Fusiliers, while some of our friends became Manchesters or Duke of Wellington’s or East Yorkshires …

He was posted to 10/Lancashire Fusiliers, where he was well received by the fiercely Irish Company Sergeant Major Doolan, ‘a regular soldier, one of the very few of the original British Expeditionary Force who had survived to this stage of the war’. He was soon calling his battalion ‘T’owd Tenth’, and was anxious to get his new cap badge.

Hodges finished the war a corporal, and proudly returned home to Northampton in full fig.

My khaki uniform was stained and worn, but my belt shone, my buttons gleamed, and my khaki tunic bore the colourful insignia of my regiment, brigade and division. On my epaulettes I wore the green and black tabs of battalion gas NCO with the brass fusilier bomb and the brass letters LF.

On my upper arms above my Corporal’s stripes, the Battalion sign, an oblong yellow flash and the 52nd Brigade sign, a green square 52, and above these and just below my epaulettes, the 17th Divisional sign, a white dot and dash on a red background. My mother said it was quite colourful.⁴⁵

In his assessment of the reasons for the Allied victory, Frederick Hodges suggested that ‘the dogged courage and will to win at whatever the cost’ was more important than ‘superior military arts and skills’. He identified ‘unquenchable spirit, the sticky and the earthy wit of the infantryman at war, who, though he was a mere pawn in the plans of generals, yet remained an individual who served ideals; and for those ideals, faced death daily at some chance or mischance of war with courage in the line of duty’. Hodges may have been more idealistic than many, but he came close to identifying the qualities which helped keep what was now a national army together in the last year of a long war.