Читать книгу Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front - Richard Holmes - Страница 15

‘Then the “Dead March”, and what a nightmare,’ wrote Will Fisher.

We draw on leather gloves, lift a body onto a sheet of brattice cloth, wrap it up, then tie it to a stretcher. ‘Off with it, boys’, and what a journey, even to us … And the stupefying heat and bad air, causing the sweat to pour down one in streams, and to add to the romance the sickening stench, rising all the time to the face of the man behind. In one place, wading to our knees in water, one man fell with the stretcher. Some bodies are heavy too, our wrists giving out before the two miles are covered … ‘Who is it?’ ‘Don’t know, indeed’, on we go … Twenty have so far been buried unidentified, owing to melting …

The pity of it all, that flesh should be so cheap.⁴⁶

This could so easily be a scene from the Western Front, perhaps in a flooded trench at Festubert in the spring of 1915, or on the northern slopes of Longueval Ridge at the end of the Somme, but it is not. Will Fisher is describing the Senghenydd mining disaster of 1913, in the heart of the South Wales coalfields, in which 439 men died. Fisher had just come off shift, but immediately went underground again to help with the rescue operations. We will meet him again, lifelong socialist but successful and committed soldier: there was less inconsistency in that than some would have us believe. For the moment, though, let him usher us into the cramped and sweaty basement of what Barbara Tuchman called ‘The Proud Tower’, the world that went to war in 1914.

It is easy to romanticise Edwardian England as just one long afternoon where it was always strawberries and cream at Henley, shooting parties at Sandringham, dinner at Quaglino’s and a breathless hush in the close as young Corinthians laid willow to leather. A gentleman could travel from London to Paris and on to Berlin and St Petersburg in the comfort of his Pullman carriage with the minimum of formalities and little risk. Churches were well attended, though earlier talk of a national religious revival now seemed misplaced. Sensible chaps like Alfred Hale could live quiet but comfortable lives on investment income. There might be a morning in the library, lunch in the club in St James’, then a first-class carriage on the ever-reliable 4.48 from Waterloo to Petersfield, and a cab from the station to find a glass of nut-brown Amontillado and one of Mrs Ling’s pies, in all its savoury splendour, waiting at home.

Even a little further down the social scale a satisfying and predictable routine could be found. J. B. Priestley left school to become a junior clerk in the wool trade, working for Helm and Co. in Swan Lane, Bradford. His day began at 9.00 and ended at 6.00, 6.30 or even 7.00 pm, though if he stayed that late there was an extra 6d in the pay packet for ‘tea away’. He smoked Cut Black Cavendish in his pipe, 3½d an ounce from Salmon and Gluckstein’s, and wrote prose and poetry at home, enjoying the ‘irregular rhythm of effort and relaxation’. Looking back on his youth he could not disguise his affection for the old world. ‘I belong at heart to the pre-1914 North Country …’ he wrote; ‘something at the core of me is still in Market Street hearing the Town Hall chimes’.⁴⁷

But we do not need to look very much harder to see the cracks in the masonry. The labour movement was growing stronger by the year: there were 422 strikes in 1909, 834 in 1912, and 1,459 in 1913: there would have been a General Strike in 1914 had war not intervened. Class divisions within Britain were still accepted by many, though there was growing rancour. On 23 January 1917 Corporal Will Fisher, already feeling the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him, wrote:

Want to go through to the end, feel fit enough. Anniversary of enlisting two years ago. DEATH OF MY BOY GEORGE. The lad is better off; he is free from wage slavery and the insults of class rule.⁴⁸

John Simpson Kirkpatrick, one of the heroes of the Australian fight for Gallipoli, was a merchant seaman from Tyneside who jumped ship in Sydney in 1909. In 1912 he told his mother:

I wonder when the work men of England will wake up and see things as other people see them. What they want in England is a good revolution and that will clear out some of the Millionaires and lords and Dukes out of it and then with a Labour Government they will be almost able to make their own conditions.⁴⁹

And if the Bradford community described by J. B. Priestley was ‘closer to a classless society than anyone born in southern England can ever understand’, there was a desperate underclass which even junior clerks seldom saw. John Cusack’s mother brought up five children in two ground-floor rooms in a Glasgow tenement. There was no bathroom, and just a cold water tap and grate in the kitchen. His father and mother slept in the bed, and the children on the floor of a room eight feet square. The family went to a public wash house once a week. After his father emigrated to America the family was barely able to survive.

For dinner at midday we’d probably have some broken biscuits which you could buy for a ha’penny a packet or we might have a ha’penny worth of hot chips from the fish and chip shop. A portion of fish cost tuppence, which was too dear for dinner …

I hardly ever wore any shoes. I used to wear short pants made of corduroy for a Sunday otherwise of flannel. They were never new, unless you were the eldest child. You simply fell into your brother’s clothes. I would wear a little flannel shirt of a dark colour, a jacket and what we’d call a bonnet or hookerdon, a cap which I pulled down well over one eye.⁵⁰

Underwear was uncommon – John Cusack’s comrades found their army issue vests and drawers items ‘previously unknown to us’. In working-class households where it did exist it had to last a full week between washes. It is small wonder that wartime rationing significantly improved the diet and health of families such as these.

In July 1901 Arthur Osburn was a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, just back from serving as a volunteer private in the Boer War, an experience which helps account for the bitter flavour of his memoirs. It was decades before the founding of the National Health Service, and the very poor depended for their medical treatment on the charity of doctors and senior medical students. Osburn was on duty in a Bermondsey slum. ‘Outside in the shabby court the heated air quivered,’ he wrote:

Odours of hops, tanneries, horse dung and wood pavement inextricably blended. The mean tumbledown dwelling I was in buzzed with flies, while the frowsy smell of unclean bedding was everywhere; here and there the familiar chain of brown vermin crawled from the loose and half-rotten skirting boards upwards onto the greasy walls. A thin wailing sound was coming down the steep rickety staircase from a room above – one of the spate of unwanted infants which plague the slums and which I had helped bring into the world, wondering at the time whether the snuffling, puling bundle of misery would not have done better to have got itself born in an African jungle.

‘That makes fifteen, and I’ve buried nine, sir,’ the mother had said. The midwife, nodding confidentially at me, had suggested a bootlace or lying the unwanted one down on a blanket. Full of youthful rigidity and righteousness I had sternly threatened her with the coroner if the child was not alive the next day.⁵¹

William Woodruff grew up in a Lancashire cotton town about ten years later. His father worked in the mill, and family life was typical of that of many manual workers, a notch up from the tenement underclass but still with precious little room for financial manoeuvre.

My brother Dan and I shared a bedroom with our parents. There were two metal beds with straw mattresses resting on thin metal slats … Dan and I slept in the same bed. We slept so close to our parents that we could touch them. The nearness of our bodies made us feel safe. I accepted my parents’ love-making long before I understood it. It was as natural as somebody using the pisspot … It didn’t disturb me, or confuse me, or revolt me. Like my father’s deep snoring, I ignored it. Living in such a confined space meant everybody shared in everybody else’s joys and sorrows.⁵²

Joseph Garvey, born in Halifax in 1888 to an Irish immigrant family, was four years old when he lost his father in a quarry accident. There were no benefits, just a collection from fellow workers and the proceeds of a benefit dance which brought in less than £10, and his mother had to raise six children. ‘It was a hard life for her,’ he reflected, ‘all work and no play, no rest. She was a small woman with long dark auburn hair, and a fresh complexion. Good looking, but she was not built on strong lines.’ She died in 1902, and Garvey eventually got a job as an assistant machine minder at 24 shillings a week, good money indeed.⁵³ Dover-born George Fortune, one of nine children,

left school at fourteen and got a job as a lather boy. It was a first class shop, they used to charge 4d for a haircut … My wages were 3/6d a week – 8 am to 8pm, Saturday 8 am till midnight. I cleaned all the windows, scrubbed out the shops, cleaned two copper urns, one for morning, one for afternoon. I never had metal polish to clean them with – paraffin oil and whitening …

I used to do this kind of work in the cellar. It was very dark there – he would not let me have a light during the day. He liked me to sweep up after customers and brush them down; take his little boy to school and bring him home; tease out dirty old combings that old ladies used to bring to have them made up into wigs; set the razors.⁵⁴

If life was hard in the shadow of dark satanic mills, the countryside was not always green and pleasant for its occupants. Life on the land was changing as machines began to replace men, eventually ‘to sacrifice the community and the connected way of life on the twin altars of speed and greed’.⁵⁵ H. J. Massingham wrote of ‘the ruin of a closely-knit society with its richly interwoven and traditional culture that had denied every change, every aggression except the one that established the modern world’.⁵⁶ In Lark Rise to Candleford Flora Thompson described her own village, Juniper Hill in North Oxfordshire, unaware that hers was a picture of a world that was changing for ever. Most men in the village lived off the land, with their own hierarchy of farm labourers, ploughmen, carters, shepherds, stockmen and blacksmiths, and nicknames like ‘Bishie’, ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Boamer’. Labourers received 10 shillings a week, skilled workers 2 shillings more. They ate one hot meal a day, usually stewed vegetables reinforced with a little bacon, for all households maintained a family pig, killed, bloodily and noisily, during the first two quarters of the moon, for the meat from a pig killed beneath a waning moon was believed to shrink in cooking.

Many farming youngsters were ‘thickset, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength …’. Their older workmates ‘stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers …’. Endurance was their favourite virtue: ‘Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal.’ Their womenfolk were as tough, and ‘a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, “I didn’t flinch, did I? Oh, I hope I didn’t flinch.”’ They did not begrudge their employer his beef and port: he was ‘Not a bad ‘ole sort … an’ does his bit by the land.’ Their rancour was reserved for his bailiff, ‘“Muster Morris” to his face but “Old Monday” or “you ole devil” behind his back.’ Boys sometimes did a stretch in the army before returning, or going off to seek work in a town. In 1914 Juniper Hill, like so many other villages, did not flinch, and sent its young men, Flora’s brother among them, to the war. ‘Eleven out of that little community never came back again,’ lamented Flora.

A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edwin.⁵⁷

Illegitimate births were unknown in ‘Lark Rise’ in the 1880s, but became frequent soon afterwards. They generally passed without much comment, but when young Emily blamed the son of the house where she had been in service for her condition there was widespread support for her. The youth was able to prove that he had been away from home at the relevant time, and Emily went on to raise a large family without benefit of husband. In Glasgow there was an overall illegitimacy rate of 7 percent in 1913, and in the very poor Blackfriars district this rose to 15.6 percent of all births. The city’s Medical Officer of Health reported that year that he feared that about 8 percent of poor children were infected with syphilis.⁵⁸ About 200 per 1,000 infants failed to survive the first year of life in many of Britain’s large industrial towns, and many that did grew up with hollow chests and rickety limbs. Overall, 60 percent of volunteers for the Boer War had been rejected as physically unfit, and even in 1918, when military medical standards were at rock bottom, over a million men were graded unfit for front-line service.⁵⁹ There was a close correlation between social class and physical fitness. A pre-war survey of Cambridge undergraduates found 70 percent in the fittest group, Class I; 20 percent in Grade II, 7.5 percent in Grade III and just 2.5 percent in Grade IV. But in Britain as a whole in 1917 only 34 percent of recruits examined were actually Grade I, and those from urban areas with high infant mortality rates fared even worse.⁶⁰

Thomas Atkins was no stranger to death. His siblings died in infancy from illnesses which would now be prevented by vaccination or cured by antibiotics. His workmates perished from a variety of accidents and diseases, and the prevalence of infection meant that even a simple cut could prove fatal. Most people then died at home, and in many households bodies were laid out in open coffins before burial. Funerals were rituals of enormous significance, for they said much about the status of the bereaved family and, by extension, of the neighbourhood.

The cut of the mourning clothes and of the funeral baked meats, the number of mutes and the number of plumes, the wreaths – who sent them and how much they cost: all the details evoke families anxious to provide as impressive a display as possible, and neighbours determined to see that they did.⁶¹

Most working-class families paid into burial and sick clubs, the latter to ensure a basic income if the breadwinner fell ill, and the former to avert the crowning insult of a pauper’s funeral.

Although most working-class communities generated a powerful sense of identity and shared values, they were by no means as crime-free as they appear in rosy retrospect. Drunkenness and its frequent concomitant wife-beating were common, and there was frequent violence, often on a small scale but sometimes, especially in Glagsow, where Catholic versus Protestant riots occurred, on a much larger scale. Even the small Hampshire brewery town of Alton (where I spent my middle years) was once so violent that policemen patrolled in pairs. The police were widely unpopular, and at least one of the reasons for widespread suspicion of the Military Police amongst First World War soldiers was an attitude forged in civilian life.

There were urgent political issues too. Lloyd George’s radical ‘Peoples’ Budget’ of 1906, which raised taxes to pay for social reforms, including old age pensions, had been passed at the cost of confrontation with the Lords, whose powers were reduced by the 1911 Parliament Act. Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women risked death for their beliefs. The apparent imminence of Home Rule for Ireland encouraged thousands of Ulstermen to arm and drill, and the so-called Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 originated in the possibility that the army might be used to coerce the North when Home Rule was granted. In June 1914 David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer (and as unreliable a prophet of the future as he was to prove a commentator on the past), assured London’s business leaders that the international skies had never been bluer. The government was far more concerned about domestic issues, and there seemed little doubt that it was right.

The Old Army mirrored this divided world. It had never been the mass army that French or German conscripts would have recognised, with middle-class men serving in rank and file alongside industrial workers or farm labourers. French infantryman Henri Barbusse tells us how:

Schoolteachers are rifle company NCOs or medical orderlies. In the Regiment, a Marist friar is a sergeant in the medical section; a tenor, the major’s cyclist; a lawyer, the colonel’s secretary; a landlord, mess-corporal in headquarter company.⁶²

Stephen Westmann, a German medical student called up in 1914, described his own army as:

a kind of mixing bowl, where young men from all classes of the population met and had to adjust themselves to an extremely rigid discipline. The aim was to create a team spirit; of course, there were square pegs who did not or would not fit into round holes and who let their side down.⁶³

In addition to being polarised by class, the British army was small. In August 1914 it had 247,432 regular officers and men against an authorised establishment of 256,798. The army reserve, ex-regulars who had completed their service but were liable to recall in the event of war, numbered 145,347. The Special Reserve, whose members had carried out six months’ full-time training, topped up with two weeks a year, was 63,933 strong, and the Territorial Force had 268,777 officers and men against a theoretical strength of 316,094. The grand total, including the Channel Islands Militias and the Bermuda and Isle of Man Volunteers, was 733,514⁶⁴ – tiny by the standards of Britain’s allies and opponents alike. Germany had a standing army of 700,000 men in peacetime, inflated to 3.8 million on mobilisation, and French figures (in her case swollen by colonial troops) were roughly comparable. The French and German armies would receive regular reinforcements as successive classes of conscripts came of age; both were used to training and equipping men on a large scale, and had thought (though their conclusions were different) about how best to integrate reservists and regulars.

They were, in short, armies which reflected the societies from which they sprang, and were geared to continental war. The British army did neither of these things. While British generals of the war have been subjected to persistent critical attention, some justified and some not, the politicians who both supported a military rapprochement with France, likely to produce British involvement in a major war, and maintained exactly the sort of army suited to wage small wars rather than large ones have been let off more lightly. Osbert Sitwell, aesthete and foot guards officer, was inclined to be less forgiving. ‘Even today you see references to the immense achievements of the Liberal administration of 1906–14,’ he wrote,

but can any government whose policy entails such a lack of preparation for war as to make that seeming solution of difficulties a gamble apparently worthwhile for an enemy, and this leads to the death or disablement of two million fellow-countrymen … Can any government which introduces old age pensions, so as ‘to help the old people’ and then allows half the manhood of the country to be slaughtered or disabled before it reaches thirty years of age, be considered to have been either benevolent or efficient?⁶⁵

The BEF of 1914 was sired by the Boer War out of the redcoat army that Wellington would have recognised. After peaking at around a quarter of a million men in the year of Waterloo, the army had settled down to an annual strength of around 180,000 men, about a third of them stationed in India. The purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871, branding was also abolished that year and flogging (except in military prisons) in 1881. Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War 1868–75, embarked upon a series of reforms which were completed by his successor. To boost recruiting, perennially sticky in peacetime, enhance the status of the soldier in society, and create a system which would link battalions serving abroad with their training and recruiting bases in the United Kingdom, the old numbered regiments of the line, with loose regional affiliations, were combined into county regiments.

The first twenty-five line infantry regiments already had two regular battalions and were left untouched: the remainder were amalgamated. Usually the marriages were logical, if not always happy: the 37th (North Hampshire) was amalgamated with the 67th (South Hampshire) to form the Hampshire Regiment, and the 28th (North Gloucestershire) was a logical bedfellow for the 61st (South Gloucestershire). There were some ruffled tartans elsewhere: the 73rd (Highland) was swallowed by the 42nd (Royal Highland) in the Black Watch, and the 75th (Stirlingshire) was devoured by the 92nd (Gordon Highlanders). We cannot be quite sure what the 99th (The Prince of Wales’s Tipperary Regiment) made of its amalgamation with the 62nd (Wiltshire) to form the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment, but we can guess. Depots, many of them red-brick pseudo-keeps, sprang up in many towns. Le Marchant Barracks in Devizes, named after a hero of Salamanca, housed the Wiltshires; Brock Barracks in Reading, commemorating Sir Isaac Brock, who brought some much-needed lustre to the War of 1812, accommodated the Berkshires, and Roussillon Barracks in Chichester, named after a French regiment whose plumes had allegedly been captured at Quebec, was the Royal Sussex depot.

Cardwell’s army with its linked battalions, one at home and one abroad, was optimised for Queen Victoria’s little wars. It was less well suited for a long war against the Boers. There were too few regulars, and although that hardy perennial, a combination of patriotic sentiment and local economic recession, encouraged tens of thousands of young men to volunteer, the performance of some war-raised units was patchy. Kipling wrote of:

Cook’s son, Duke’s son,

Son of a belted Earl,

Forty thousand horse and foot

Going to Table Bay …

The reality was less splendid. Wags quipped that the brass IY shoulder-title worn by the Imperial Yeomanry really stood for ‘I Yield’, and the lugubrious ditty ‘The Boers have got my Daddy’ became all too popular in music halls. It is probably true to say that neither the German nor the French armies, many of whose officers gained a good deal of pleasure from watching the lion’s tail getting twisted, would have done much better, and the eventual British victory owed much to the experience of colonial campaigning elsewhere. But it was clear that the army required thoroughgoing reform. It had been compelled to field almost 450,000 men to win, losing 5,774 killed in action and 16,168 to disease or wounds.

Reforms, however, were sporadic. In the immediate aftermath of the Boer War Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the commander in chief, pressed ahead with the development of the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and the quick-firing artillery which the army was to take to war in 1914, giving a crucial impetus to marksmanship training. But William St John Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War, had a rougher ride. He had a grandiose scheme for a substantial increase in the size of the army, but his Cabinet colleagues would not allow him to consider conscription in order to sustain this new force and it became clear that voluntary recruitment would not meet its needs. Brodrick departed, his only legacy the bitterly-unpopular peakless cap which bore his name. ‘We thoroughly detested this new cap,’ recalled Frank Richards,

which the majority of men said made them look like bloody German sailors, but we much preferred it to the poked cap which followed it … When this cap first appeared the men said that the War Office was being run from Potsdam. They were rotten caps to carry in a man’s haversack.⁶⁶

Brodrick was replaced by Mark Arnold-Forster. He initially hoped to save money by sharply reducing volunteer and auxiliary forces (how history repeats itself), but was seen off by opponents in both Houses, and although he had more success with his ‘New Army Scheme’, based on a mix of long and short service, the Conservative government fell before substantial changes could be made.

Yet the period was by no means sterile. Although the report of the Royal Commission on the South African War was delivered in 1903 at the time of a political crisis which limited its impact, Lord Esher, one of its members and a close associate of the king, had chaired a small committee which made several useful proposals. Amongst them were the strengthening of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the addition of a permanent secretariat; the restructuring of the army’s command structure by the abolition of the post of commander in chief and the creation of an Army Council with a chief of the general staff as its professional head with the adjutant general, quartermaster general, master general of the ordnance, permanent under secretary and financial secretary as its members. The three main branches of the general staff were created – the directorates of Army Training, Staff Duties and Military Operations. Indeed, the general staff thus created remains recognisable at the time of writing.⁶⁷

R. B. Haldane, Secretary of State in Asquith’s Liberal Cabinet, was a German-educated lawyer who brought formidable intellectual gifts to his task. At the first meeting of the Army Council after taking office, Haldane was asked what sort of army he envisaged. ‘An Hegelian army,’ was his reply, and with that, he observed, the ‘conversation rather fell off. Indeed, there was a philosophical logic to his scheme. He hoped to create a genuinely national army, with its regulars constituting ‘a sharp point of finely tempered steel’, its Special Reserve providing immediate back up, and the Territorial Force furnishing a basis for expansion and support. Haldane was lucky in several respects. His government could expect to run a full term, so time was not pressing; he chose as his military advisers Gerald Ellison and Douglas Haig, who had a very good grasp of organisational politics; and the Esher reforms were already beginning to bear fruit.

Although Haldane later argued that his reforms were overshadowed by his knowledge of the Anglo-French staff talks, the instrument he created was not forged with a specific purpose in view, but was simply the best he could do within his reduced budget. It would consist of two distinct entities: a regular element, geared to producing an expeditionary force of six infantry divisions and a cavalry division, and a part-time Territorial Force, formed by combining the various militia, volunteer and auxiliary forces, which would take responsibility for home defence, thereby freeing up the regulars for foreign service. He reverted to the Cardwell terms of enlistment, seven or eight years’ service with the colours and four or five on the reserve. Haldane’s reforms did not please everyone, and the National Service League loudly proclaimed that nothing but compulsory service would do. Such a step was politically unacceptable to what was, at least by the standards of the age, a left-leaning Cabinet, and Haldane had done the best he could within his constraints.

Wellington would have recognised the regular army that emerged from Haldane’s reforms because, in many key respects, it had changed little since his day. The majority of men who enlisted as private soldiers were unemployed when they joined, and few even laid claim to a trade on their enlistment papers. One 1913 recruit admitted frankly that it was ‘unemployment and the need for food’ that encouraged him to join. John Cusack enlisted in the Highland Light Infantry when he was fourteen, telling the recruiting sergeant he was eighteen: urchins shouted ‘beef and a tanner a day’ as the recruits marched past, suggesting that that was why they had joined the army.⁶⁸ His mother reclaimed him and took him home, but three weeks later he signed on again, this time in the Royal Scots Greys.

What is striking about those pre-war regulars who have left some record of their motives is just how many were attracted by more than a full belly and a good pair of boots. Herbert Wootton recalled that he was:

Very keen on becoming a soldier. I had two uncles, both regulars who had served through the South African War of 1899–1902. As a youngster I was thrilled with their stories. I became a keen reader of G. A. Henty’s books on war, and later read Rudyard Kipling’s books. I loved to be in the company of old soldiers.⁶⁹

R. A. Lloyd ‘had always wanted to be a soldier, and a cavalryman at that’.⁷⁰ Frank Richards grew up in the South Wales coalfield, and his cousin David joined the army during the miners’ strike of 1898. But despite ‘all the Socialist propaganda’ he was ‘a rank Imperialist at heart’, and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers because:

they had one battalion in China, taking part in the suppression of the Boxer Rising, and the other battalion in South Africa, and a long list of battle honours on their Colours, and … they were the only regiment in the Army privileged to wear the flash. The flash was a smart bunch of five black ribbons sewed in a fan shape in the back of the tunic collar, it was a relic of the days when soldiers wore their hair long, and tied up the end of the queue in a bag to prevent it from greasing their tunics.⁷¹

Uniform also helped attract R. G. Garrod. He was a junior clerk when he saw ‘a gorgeous figure in blue with yellow braid and clinking spurs and said to myself “that’s for me …”.’⁷² William Nicholson, whose grandfather had charged with the 13th Light Dragoons at Balaklava, ‘was attracted by the full-dress uniform of mounted regiments’, and joined the Royal Horse Artillery in 1911.⁷³ John Lucy and his brother Denis went ‘a bit wild’ after their mother’s death and duly joined up.

We were tired of landladies and mocked the meaning of the word. We were tired of fathers, of advice from relations, of bottled coffee essence, of school, of newspaper offices. The soft accents and slow movements of the small farmers who swarmed in the streets of our dull southern Irish town, the cattle, fowl, eggs, butter, bacon and the talk of politics filled us with loathing.⁷⁴

They were ‘full of life and the spirit of adventure …’.Joseph Garvey, too, was:

obsessed with a desire to get out into the world … I was looking to the new life with joyful anticipation. Being fit, strong and athletic I could not see anything that would prevent me from enjoying the life of a soldier. So ended one phase of my life, and despite all the head shaking at my foolishness in throwing up a good job, I had no doubt in my own mind that I was doing the right thing.⁷⁵

Training was hard. John Lucy thought its strain ‘so hard that many broke under it’.

The military vocabulary, minor tactics, knowledge of parts of the rifle, route marches, fatigues, semaphore, judging distance, shooting, lectures on ‘esprit de corps’, and on the history of our regiment, spit and polish, drill, saluting drill, physical training, and other, forgotten subjects were rubbed into us for the worst six months of my life … In time we effaced ourselves. Our bodies developed and our backs straightened according to plan … Pride of arms possessed us, and we discovered that our regiment was a regiment, and then some.⁷⁶

A man survived easiest if he set out to conform. Joseph Garvey joined the Scots Guards, and found himself on the sixteen-week-long recruits’ course at Caterham.

The drill was exacting, no slackness was permitted on or off the square. I began to understand the reason for iron discipline and fell into line at once, and tried to make myself a good soldier. Handling arms was not easy the way they had to do it, but it soon became natural and at the end of the sixteen weeks I was quite ready to take over the guard duty …

We proved to be a good squad and we passed out with credit. The Sergeant and Corporal were pleased with us.”⁷⁷

Cavalrymen had the added challenge of mastering horse as well as arms. ‘Each of the horses had a number,’ recalled R. G. Garrod,

And mine was 52, and I suppose I then and there fell in love with her. She was under fifteen hands, had the heart of a lion, would try to jump anything possible and if a sword was cut down the side of her eyes would never flinch or run.

She had to be groomed twice a day. ‘First sponge out eyes, nose and dock,’ wrote Private Garrod, ‘then pick out feet, then start to brush, using only the brush on the horse, while the curry comb, held in the left hand, was only used for cleaning the brush.’ He was reminded that horses were more important than men: ‘they could get a new man for 1/- a day, but a horse cost £40’.⁷⁸ After passing off the recruit ride he was promoted to the first-class ride, with sword, spurs, rifle and the two reins of his double bridle. By the end of it ‘we were extremely well trained in horsemanship, doing attack riding, vaulting, which entails jumping off your horse at full gallop and leaping up again into the saddle. We took jumps with no reins and no stirrups, just with folded arms.’

Most cavalrymen had only one horse to look after, but drivers in the artillery had two, and two sets of tack. William Nicholson was delighted to become an artillery signaller, ‘which put me on the battery staff and relieved me of my two sets of draught harness which was a great day for me’. Harness did not simply have to be clean, but polished, with leather and brasswork shining. Metalwork, like bits and chains, was unplated steel, and was burnished bright. Sometimes this was accomplished by shaking it up in a sack with old newspaper, but often there was no alternative to rubbing with the ‘burnisher’ – a piece of leather 3½ inches square, with interlocking links of chain sewn to one side that resembled chain mail.

Recruits, like trained soldiers, lived in barrack rooms which housed between twenty and forty men, so that all the private soldiers in an infantry platoon or cavalry troop lived together. There were thirty-two in John Cusack’s recruit troop, with two old soldiers, Tom Hood and Chokey Bone, who showed them how to clean their kit and muck out. They lived in screened-off ‘bunks’ at the end of the barrack room, which gave corporals some privacy in trained soldiers’ accommodation. The barracks of the Cardwell era had separate wash houses and latrine blocks, and, though some had had water closets fitted subsequently, most Edwardian soldiers, like their grandfathers, relied on the spooneristically-named sip-pot. John Cusack and his comrades rose at 5.00 in the summer and 6.00 in the winter, and their day began with:

emptying the enormous piss-tub outside our barrack room. Mucking out – breakfast – PT – first drill. 1100 – stables (changed into canvas) and groomed till 1200 – then fed them and went for lunch. 1400 square for rifle or sword drill. A long time to get prepared – little time for meal.

Infantrymen did bayonet training with padded jackets and ‘rifles’ with spring-loaded plungers where the bayonets would have been, and cavalrymen fenced with blunted swords. ‘Sergeant Croft was a real brute,’ thought Private Richard Chant of the 5th Dragoon Guards. ‘When one was fencing him one could always be sure of a few bruises, even through the padded jacket. But after all Sergeant Croft made men of us in the drill he conducted, and we all sang our praises of him afterwards.’⁷⁹ Training went on till 4.00, when it was time for stables again, then the ‘tea meal’ – lunch was still the main meal of the day – kit-cleaning and bed. Pyjamas were so rare that a man would risk bullying if he wore them. Most men slept in a grey-back shirt and long johns, or gym shorts in the summer.

Once a man had ‘passed off the square’ as a recruit and could ‘pass the guard’ – that is, satisfy the orderly sergeant at the guardroom that he was fit to be seen in public — then he could ‘walk out’ in his best uniform. Cavalrymen carried regimental whips and infantrymen regimental canes. As late as 1915 a puzzled New Army recruit at Aldershot found himself inexplicably rejected by the guard until he bought a Rifle Brigade cane.

Men spent hard-earned money in order to look extra smart. Experienced cavalrymen bought overalls (tight trousers) of superfine cloth which clung to the leg, had fine leather stitched to the tops of their issue boots, bought chrome-plated spurs and had coins fitted to the rowels to make them jingle. The weekly church parade in full dress was a ritual no less striking than a Zulu war dance or monastic mass. A large garrison like Aldershot, Catterick or the Curragh might see a whole brigade in the same church, and even the irreligious were stirred. ‘The uniforms were wonderful, wonderful,’ mused Richard Chant, ‘could such a thing happen that they all came back again, but I’m afraid it’s all wishful thinking.’ But, he added, ‘should my memoirs be read by anyone, believe me, each man was proud of his regiment, be it Cavalry, Royal Horse Artillery, Royal Field Artillery or Infantry.’⁸⁰

Regimental pride went deep. Recruits had the lineage of their regiment, its battle honours, regimental days, and quasi-masonic practices drilled into them. Soldiers in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, for instance, would know that theirs was the senior English regiment of the line, as such junior only to the Royal Scots, the 1st of Foot. ‘First and Worst,’ opined Queensmen to Royal Scots, who made clear their disagreement, with boots and belt buckles. Raised in 1661 to garrison Tangiers, the North African enclave brought to the English crown as dowry by Charles II’s wife, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, the regiment was once nicknamed ‘The Tangerines’. The Queen’s bore Catherine’s cipher of two ‘C’s interlaced within the Garter on its colours, and continued to carry a third colour, with the cipher on a green background, long after all other infantry regiments in the army had been reduced to two colours. Its

Paschal lamb badge and the name of Colonel Piercy Kirke, who commanded it at Sedgemoor in 1684, then gave it the nickname ‘Kirke’s Lambs’, an ironic reference to its less than lamb-like gentleness to West Countrymen captured fighting for the Duke of Monmouth. By the time of the First World War it was often known, because of the lamb and flag on its badge, as ‘The Mutton Lancers’, or, in Cockney slang, as ‘The Pork and Beans’. Members of the East Surreys spoke of it as ‘The Other Surrey Regiment’, which is precisely what Queensmen called the East Surreys.

From 1837 to 1881 the regiment marched passed the saluting base to a tune called The Old Queen’s, which included part of the national anthem. In 1881 this tune was played when 1/Queen’s paraded before Queen Victoria at a review at Aldershot. The queen asked whether special permission had been given for use of the national anthem, adding, unamused, that unless it had, the practice must cease. No authority could be found, and so for a short time the regiment made its feelings clear by passing the saluting base without music, earning the nickname ‘The Silent Second’. In 1883 Lieutenant Colonel Kelly-Kenny, then commanding the 1st Battalion, wrote to the Portuguese embassy explaining what had happened, pointing out the regiment’s connection with the House of Braganza, and asking if a Portuguese air could be used. The result was the fine march Braganza, actually a free adaptation of the air O Patria, the Portuguese national anthem at the time. Soldiers inevitably put words to it:

Here we come, here we come

Bloody great bastards every one …

Officers, in the post-prandial conviviality of a dinner night, accompanied the band with a more genteel version:

I absolutely do refuse To be ordered about unless I choose …

The Queen’s Royal Regiment’s battle honours began with ‘Tangier 1662–80’, and included scores of others, from ‘Dettingen’ to ‘Corunna’, ‘Cabool 1842’, ‘Sobraon’, ‘Sevastopol’, ‘Pekin 1860’ and ‘South Africa 1899–1902’. On 1 June 1794 a detachment of the regiment had served as marines aboard Lord Howe’s flagship Queen Charlotte at his victory over the French of Ushant, and this was commemorated as the regimental day. HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school on Whale Island, Portsmouth, inherited the traditions of Queen Charlotte, and there was a strong connection between the regiment and HMS Excellent, with an annual cricket week. Regimental treasure included a huge silver wine cooler, officially the Jerningham-Kandler wine cooler but known, to generations of irreverent young officers, predictably preoccupied by some of the female figures embodied in its rococo decoration, as ‘The Flying Tits’.

In 1902 1/Queen’s won the Punjab Open polo tournament, and five officers commemorated it with a silver horse statuette: two were wounded and two killed in action during the First World War. Another trophy, the Army in India Efficiency Prize, was won by 1/Queen’s in 1905. The competition required all soldiers in a battalion, except those actually in hospital, to compete. It was so savage, including a thirty-mile march in full kit (one veteran believed that he carried 150lbs in all), and with a variety of tests, that some men died. The event was not repeated, so the battalion was allowed to retain the trophy. Hardened drinkers took comfort from the fact that 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, the runners-up, lost five men on the march, all of them teetotallers.⁸¹

If the Queen’s could boast a longer history than most regiments, there was nothing genuinely unique about it, for the old army was a rich repository of history (real and invented), traditions and artefacts, making regiments social organisms as distinctive as Scots clans or Native American tribes. We must, though, guard against uncritical assumption that the sheer visibility of the regimental system, reinforced most poignantly by cap badges engraved on headstones in Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, means that it was the main reason for men fighting. It certainly mattered hugely to pre-war regulars, especially to officers and senior NCOs, who might spend the whole of their working lives in the same peripatetic community, soldiering together from Catterick to Calcutta and from Kimberley to the Khyber. Herbert Wootton, a pre-war member of the Royal Horse Guards, told me that he fought for ‘the Regiment and its traditions, also my comrades’.⁸² Alan Hanbury-Sparrow was a thoroughly committed regimental officer – ‘I always felt it my duty to be with 1/Royal Berks at the front’ – but felt that the value of the regimental system diminished as the war went on. ‘The casualty lists put an enormous strain on these traditions,’ he wrote. ‘I became increasingly cynical about their value.’⁸³

There were some things men were less proud of, for, as Frank Richards described it, ‘booze and fillies’ were a constant preoccupation for regular soldiers. It was a hard-drinking army: in 1912–13, 9,230 men were fined for drunkenness, and this does not include the many more given drills or other punishments by officers or NCOs. Lieutenant George Barrow, a cavalry officer carrying out a brief attachment to the infantry in 1884, found himself serving with the 88th Foot, the Devil’s Own, then properly known as The Connaught Rangers. ‘Drink was the besetting sin of the Connaught men,’ he wrote.⁸⁴ In the dimly-lit regimental ‘wet canteen’ men could buy weak beer known as ‘swipes’: ‘one could drink a great many glasses of this sort of beer without feeling the effects of it’. Men drank steadily and sang songs of studied and refined vulgarity, such as ‘The Girl I nearly Wed’:

I wake up sweating every night to think what might have been, For in another corner, boys, she’d stored the Magazine, The Magazine, a barrel of snuff, and one or two things more, And in another corner, boys, was the Regiment forming fours.⁸⁵

Philanthropists and reformers had done much, over the previous thirty years, to ensure that soldiers had some alternative to the ‘wet canteen’. The ‘Garrison Institute Coffee Shop’ and ‘Sandys Soldiers’ Home’ offered heat, light and daily papers, and cheap ‘char and a wad’ (tea and a sandwich).⁸⁶ The Army Temperance Society encouraged men to give up alcohol altogether, and there was a strong thread of religious Nonconformity and temperance running through the army, especially amongst NCOs. But they were never more than a respectable minority, mocked as ‘tea busters’ or ‘bun wallahs’. Many soldiers would go to great lengths to get alcohol, whatever the risks. When the 11th Hussars arrived in France in August 1914 two zealous troopers discovered that the huge cotton warehouse that housed their brigade also contained the BEF’s rum casks. Their binge cost them three months’ imprisonment apiece.

Men brawled drunk, and they brawled sober. Within the regiment they were encouraged to settle matters with their fists, but when dealing with outsiders ‘the buckled ends of belts were used, also boots’. John Lucy’s Royal Irish Rifles had an ‘old and sworn enemy’ in a nearby English regiment, and he noticed how: ‘The Englishmen in our own regiment forgot nationality and beat up their own countrymen in the supposed defence of the honour of their chosen corps.’⁸⁷ The Essex and Bedfordshire Regiments had a feud dating back to the Boer War, when an encircled Essex patrol had allegedly not been rescued by the nearby Bedfords, who were just falling in for church parade. Percy Croney, who served in 12/Essex, knew that: ‘when an Essex man sees a Bedford badge, in memory of that patrol he must call: “Thou shalt not kill,” and the Bedford man, in honour of his regiment, must fight.’⁸⁸ Pubs in garrison towns were the scenes of large-scale inter-regmental fights. ‘Christmas always meant a damned good tuck-in,’ wrote Frank Richards, ‘with plenty of booze and scraps to follow.’ Inter-regimental brawls were common. Highland Regiments could be provoked (though for no easily-discernible historical reason) by asking for ‘’arf a pint o’ broken square’; a member of the York and Lancaster Regiment would respond vigorously to a cheery greeting of ‘The Cork and Doncaster, I presume’; and ‘scholars’ made insulting translations of high-sounding Latin mottoes and then ducked to avoid the bar stool.

The Welch Regiment had a long-running feud with the Royal Marines, its memory kept green in many a beery den. Frank Richards, as a soldier and Welshman bound to go to the aid of a brother in need, heard the traditional pre-fight patter in a Plymouth pub. A Welshman greeted a marine in ‘a friendly sort of tone’:

‘Pleased to meet you, Joey, let’s you and I have a talk about old times.’

‘What old times, Taffy?’ asked the marine, suspiciously.

‘That sea-battle long ago – I forget its name – where my regiment once served aboard a bloody flagship of the Royal Navy.’

‘What as? Ballast?’ asked the marine, finishing his beer before the trouble started.

‘No, as marines, whatever,’ answered the Welshman. ‘It was like this. The Admiral wanted a bit of fighting done, and the sailors were all busy with steering the bloody ship and looping up the bloody sails, see? And the marines said they didn’t feel like doing any bloody fighting that day, see? So of course he called in the Old Sixty-Ninth to undertake the job.’

‘Never heard tell before of a marine who didn’t feel like fighting,’ said the marine, setting down his empty mug and jumping forwards like a boxing kangaroo.

In a moment we were all at it, hammer and tongs, and the sides being even, a decent bit of blood flowed: fortunately the scrap ended before murder was done, by the landlord shouting that the picket was on the way.⁸⁹

The subject of women was just as contentious. The army began to build quarters for married soldiers and their families towards the end of the nineteenth century, but soldiers required permission to marry ‘on the strength’ and at the turn of the century had to have five years’ service and be twenty-six years of age before being considered. ‘A man who married off the strength,’ observed Frank Richards, ‘had to keep his wife on his own shilling a day; she lived outside barrack and he inside, and they met whenever they could, but officially she did not exist’.⁹⁰

Single men in barracks, as Kipling accurately observed, did not grow into plaster saints, and, deprived of much chance of marriage, made other arrangements. Prostitutes thronged about in garrison towns, and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1864, which vainly sought to control venereal disease by medical inspection and compulsory treatment, covered towns like Aldershot, Colchester and Woolwich in England and Cork in Ireland. Also included was the great military camp outside Dublin, the Curragh of Kildare, where girls and women known as ‘wrens’ lived rough outside the camp. Occasionally, when girls got into barracks, things got out of control; in 1896 soldiers of a Yorkshire regiment were involved in a gang rape, and three of them were sent to prison. There were more comfortable arrangements for officers, who could not be expected to rough it in huts out on the furze, and the future Edward VII was gently initiated into what became a life-long preoccupation at the Curragh in 1861.⁹¹ Regiments stationed in India maintained lal bazaars, essentially regimental brothels, and there were also many private establishments. Frank Richards recalled that ‘a magnificently built half-caste prostitute of fifty years of age’ decided to celebrate her retirement by giving:

free access to her body between the hours of 6pm and 11pm. Preference was given to old customers. She posted a notice to this effect on the door of her room and if I related how many men applied and were admitted and went away satisfied in those short hours, I should not be believed.⁹²

Girlfriends were smuggled into barracks too. One of Richards’ corporals briefly kept a woman in his bunk, an arrangement which led to predictable difficulties over an alternative use to which one of the company’s tea buckets was put. The architects who designed the ornamental iron railings surrounding Cardwell barracks had inadvertently spaced them so widely that sexual commerce could comfortably be carried out between them.⁹³

It is important that we do not follow the Duke of Wellington and believe that all regular soldiers were ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink …’, however. There was a sprinkling of gentleman-rankers, who had joined for a variety of reasons and usually kept quiet about them. Sometimes there were tragedies that we can only guess at. In 1909 Private John Vivian Crowther of the 18th Hussars shot himself in barracks. He was described at his inquest as ‘a cultured and educated Oxford graduate who had inherited a large property’.⁹⁴ John Lucy tells how:

There was a taciturn sergeant from Waterford who was conversant with the intricacies of higher mathematics … There was an ex-divinity student with literary tastes, who drank much beer and affected an obvious pretence to gentle birth; a national school teacher; a man who had absconded from a colonial bank; a few decent sons of farmers.

And there were the properly ambitious. Lucy declared that: ‘Promotion … is my mark’ and was speedily made a lance corporal. He found that the first promotion was the hardest to bear, for he was at once separated from his comrades and for the new NCO ‘every order he has to give to an old friend is a pain’.⁹⁵ Frank Richards decided that the price of promotion was too high, and obstinately declined it throughout his eight years with the colours and the whole of his wartime service. There were many like him: in 1918 young Frederick Hodges found himself in command of Private Pearson MM – ‘a short, sturdy little man … nearly twice my age’. Pearson had a long-running gag about the tinned pork and beans which were a common ration issue (‘I say, where is the pork?’). And he always called Hodges ‘Corp’.⁹⁶

A hard-working regular soldier, who took his military training and army education seriously, might become a lance corporal in a year or two and corporal in three. He would be unlikely to make sergeant in his first enlistment – although promotion had speeded up during the Boer War – and the prospect of a third stripe and the more comfortable life of the sergeants’ mess was dangled out to persuade men to sign on after their first term. It was possible to get promoted from sergeant to colour sergeant (in the infantry) or staff sergeant (in other arms) and on to warrant officer in ten years, though this was fast work. King’s Regulations specifically guaranteed that warrant officers would be able to complete twelve years’ service, which entitled them to a small pension. Senior NCOs and warrant officers were likely to be able to complete twenty-one years’ service, increasing their pensions, as long as they remained fit, and could serve even longer with their commanding officer’s support. The Northamptons boasted a private soldier who had joined the regiment as a boy and died in harness just before the Boer War at the age of fifty-five. There were always jobs around the battalion which old soldiers like this could do: running the store which held the privately-purchased sports kit, helping break in recruits (‘Leave to fall out, trained soldier, please?’) and, of course, looking after the young gentlemen.

Most of the officers came from what Edward Spiers has called ‘the traditional sources of supply’, and even that arch-traditionalist the Duke of Wellington would have been struck by how little the officer corps of 1914 differed from that he had taken to Waterloo 101 years before. The peerage, gentry, military families, the clergy and the professions provided its bulk, with a minority coming from business, commercial and industrial families.⁹⁷ In practice social divisions were more flexible than they might seem, with families who had made good in trade setting the seal on their gentility by buying land, marrying their daughters into the aristocracy and sending their sons into the army. Many a young man with a good education, crested signet ring and commission in a smart regiment was only two generations away from the shovel or the counting house.

Military families played as important a part in the army of 1914 as they had in Wellington’s: no less than 43.1 percent of the fathers of cadets entering Sandhurst in the summer intake of 1910 were ‘military professionals’. In the winter of 1917 this had sunk to 17.9 percent, but by the winter of 1930 it was an astonishing 62.4 percent.⁹⁸ The future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, commissioned into the Black Watch in 1901, remembered that:

I never felt any special inclination to a military career, but it would have taken more independence of character than I possessed at the time, to avoid it. Nearly all my relations were military. I had been brought up among soldiers; and my father, while professing to give me complete liberty of choice, was determined that I should be a soldier. I had no particular bent towards any other profession, and I took the line of least resistance.⁹⁹

Alan Brooke came from a long line of soldiers originating in Ulster, and initially wanted to be a doctor, but military blood was thicker than medical water, and off he went to Woolwich to become a gunner. It was as well for Britain’s conduct of the Second World War that he did, although even at the height of his powers the slight, bespectacled Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke had, perhaps, a touch of the consulting room to him.

Just as Wellington’s officer corps contained a good many young men whose only fortune was their sword, so too the army of 1914 had many officers who were just on the right side of the borders of gentility. This often made for an uncomfortable life, for although the purchase of commissions had been abolished a generation before, being an officer in the British army was an expensive business. In 1903 a War Office Committee reckoned that an officer needed a minimum of £160 a year in addition to his pay to be able to survive in the infantry. Life in the cavalry was more expensive, for a subaltern needed to provide himself with at least one charger and could hardly avoid hunting and playing polo: he could just scrape by with £300 a year, but the average private income of cavalry officers was £6–700. In 1912 Major General M. F. Rimington warned that it had once been possible to find rich young men to join the cavalry because they were not expected to work hard. But now they were expected to work till 1.00 or even 3.00 in the afternoon: who would pay to serve in the cavalry and have to work too?¹⁰⁰ The Hutchinson Committee of 1905 was inclined to agree. It believed that many young men would like to join the cavalry if only they could afford it, and urged that the government should make it cheaper for young officers to maintain themselves in the cavalry by providing chargers and saddlery at public expense.

Alan Hanbury-Sparrow joined the Royal Berkshires in 1912 with just £175 a year, and found it hard going. In the following year E. G. W. Harrison survived in the Royal Artillery with only £18 a year which brought his total income to £92. ‘Mess bill without a drink or a cigarette [was] £6 monthly’, he wrote, ‘soldier servant and washing £1 monthly, so a penny bus fare was a matter of deep consideration’.¹⁰¹ Towards the other extreme, Osbert Sitwell’s father (advised by the wonderfully-named Major Archie Gowk) gave him £530 a year in 1912 as a Yeomanry officer attached to a regular cavalry regiment, but stressed that if young Osbert received any pay he would expect to be given it. But some officers survived despite the odds. William Robertson had joined the army as a private in 1877 despite his mother’s declaration that she would rather bury him than see him in a red coat. He reached the rank of sergeant major before being commissioned, and managed to survive on his pay, though he acknowledges the kindness of his brother regimental warrant officers who clubbed together to buy him his saddlery. He became chief of the imperial general staff during the First World War, making the British army unique amongst allies and enemies in having as its professional head an officer commissioned from the ranks.

Officer training reflected old traditions. Officers destined for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, the ‘gentlemen of the Ordnance’, went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, known as ‘the shop’, which had trained them since the eighteenth century. Entry was by competitive examination: the young Alan Brooke sweated blood at an army crammer’s, eventually passing in to Woolwich 65th out of 72. The entrance exam included compulsory papers in English, French or German, and mathematics, and a choice of two papers from further mathematics, history, German, Latin, French and science. Those who passed out with the highest places in the final order of merit tended to go to the Royal Engineers, and the remainder to the Royal Artillery: in the December 1909 list numbers 1–11 became sappers and 12–36 gunners.¹⁰²

Officers for the cavalry, infantry, Indian army and Army Service Corps went to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which had existed since 1799, though it had not trained the majority of officers until after the abolition of purchase. Entrance to Sandhurst too was by competitive examination, and its final order of merit was no less important than that at Woolwich. Officers who hoped to go to the Indian army, where they could live on their pay, had to pass out towards its top. Young Bernard Montgomery (already under a cloud for setting fire to a fellow cadet’s shirt-tail) passed out too low to be admitted to the Indian army and joined the Royal Warwickshires instead. It is fashionable to decry the standards attained at Sandhurst: one scholar has observed that it was amazing what a young man did not have to know to get into the cavalry or artillery. However, anyone choosing to look at their examination papers would be struck by the fact that these were no brainless hearties.

While Woolwich trained 99 percent of artillery and engineer officers, Sandhurst trained only 67 percent of the officers destined for the infantry and cavalry. Some 2 percent were commissioned from the ranks. These were combatant commissions, whose holders would take rank and precedence alongside their comrades from public school, as opposed to the holders of quartermaster’s or riding master’s commissions, appointed to honorary commissions for specific jobs. Of the remainder, about half came from universities, where they had undertaken some training in the Senior Division of the Officers’ Training Corps: the Junior Division – ‘the Corps’ – comprised contingents in public schools. Most of the others had entered the army through ‘the militia back door’. Officers holding a commission in the militia or Yeomanry (or the Special Reserve or Yeomanry from 1908) could bypass Sandhurst altogether by taking a competitive examination for a direct commission. This was how Field Marshal Sir John French, who had started his career in the navy, had got into the army, and Henry Wilson, his deputy chief of staff in 1914, had followed the same route.

Rory Baynes, considering a military career, confessed that:

I much preferred the idea of sporting a militia officer’s magnificent uniform than that of going to Sandhurst, where in those days I would have had to spend almost two years in what was a rather strict public school atmosphere.

He was accordingly commissioned in 1906 into the 3rd Bedfordshire Militia, a ‘strange and exclusive crowd’: no experience was necessary, but the personal approval of the regiment’s colonel, the Duke of Bedford, certainly was. Young Baynes trained with his battalion, spent some time attached to a regular battalion of the Bedfords, and studied for the militia competitive examination with Major Heath, an army crammer in Folkestone, a distinctive character with Kaiser Bill moustaches, and duly came top in the 1907 examination. Although he was by then a full lieutenant in the militia, he had to revert to second lieutenant on joining his preferred regular regiment, the Cameronians.¹⁰³ Osbert Sitwell found it all arranged for him by his forceful father:

Even Henry, who usually appeared to possess a special insight into the workings of my father’s mind, could not help me … Then, one morning, I found out: for I read, suddenly turning a page of the newspaper that had just arrived, that a 2nd Lieut. F. O. S. Sitwell had just been granted a commission in the Yeomanry, and was, from the Yeomanry, attached to a famous regiment of Hussars.

Osbert duly reported at Aldershot in the foggy winter of 1911–12, and his first shock was getting in to his mess kit, then worn for dinner on weeknights: officers relaxed in the down-market black tie for dinner at weekends.

Every part of the body had to be dragged and pinched and buttoned, and the boots were so tight that one could neither pull them on nor take them off, and remained for many minutes in a kind of seal-like flipper-limbo as to the feet. Only by the kindness and perseverance of Robbins – my new servant who, as I write, some thirty-three years later, is still with me … was I able to encase myself in this unaccustomed glory.¹⁰⁴

In November 1912 he transferred to the regular army, and joined the Grenadier Guards at the Tower of London. Here he was interviewed by the regimental lieutenant colonel who seemed to be:

the improbable realisation of an ideal; an ideal cherished by a considerable number of contemporaries, including most officers and all the best tailors and haberdashers, hosiers, shoemakers and barbers in London, indeed in England … At a single glance it might be deemed possible by the inexperienced, such was the apparent sincerity and straightforwardness of his self-presentation, to know all about him, even to write a testimonial, strong sense of duty, hard-playing (golf, cricket, polo), generous, brave, fine shot, adequate rider, man of the world, C. of E.

He remembered the great royal review of the Brigade of Guards on 28 April 1913 as ‘a final salute from an old order which was to perish, and constituted for those taking part in it – and how few survived the next two years! – a sort of fanfare, heralding the war’.¹⁰⁵