Читать книгу Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front - Richard Holmes - Страница 17

That arch-regular Lord Kitchener, appointed Secretary of State for War in the summer of 1914, had a low opinion of the Territorial Force. In part it stemmed from his experience of the Franco-Prussian War, when he had served briefly with Chanzy’s Army of the Loire and had been less than impressed by French irregulars. In part it reflected the fact that he had spent most of his career abroad, and had been wholly untouched by Haldane’s advocacy of a national army. Indeed, he admitted to the formidable leader of the Ulster Unionists: ‘I don’t know Europe; I don’t know England; and I don’t know the British Army.’ And in part it embodied his own instinctive mistrust of the amateur: on the morning that he took over the War Office he declared that ‘he could take no account of anything but regular soldiers’.¹²² And to raise a new one he decided to bypass the territorial system altogether.

Kitchener’s decision has been widely criticised, but it was not wholly illogical. Many territorials immediately volunteered for foreign service: F. S. Hatton proudly remembered that in his unit ‘the men who did not wish to volunteer for foreign service were asked to take a pace to the rear. The ranks remained unbroken.’¹²³ The Northumberland Hussars affirmed that all its men had already accepted foreign service as a condition of their enlistment. But the picture was far patchier elsewhere. Walter Nicholson, a regular staff officer in what was to become the very good 51st Highland Division, admitted: ‘We were very far from being a division fit for defence.’¹²⁴ Some men immediately volunteered for foreign service; some officers automatically assumed that their men would volunteer, and unwisely took this assumption for assent. Others would not serve abroad. ‘It was not cowardice that decided them to say they wouldn’t fight,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘it was the belief that the Government had broken faith with them … The Territorial had not joined for foreign service, but to defend his country.’ One of the division’s officers observed that: ‘There must be something wrong if employers go out to fight alongside Regular private soldiers.’¹²⁵ In the Suffolk Yeomanry the officers of one squadron, an MP amongst them, told their men not to volunteer for foreign service and not to give way to the government’s blackmail.

The overwhelming majority of territorials did indeed undertake to serve abroad (perhaps 80-90 percent of many units), and some were fighting in France as early as October 1914, when the fine performance of the London Scottish at Messines showed that territorials went into battle, and to their deaths, with the same determination as regulars. But a few did not, and there remained a slightly curmudgeonly rump of territorials who stuck defiantly to their rights until the changes in the law in 1916 rendered them liable for foreign service anyhow. Nicholson also felt that the problem of post-mobilisation training had not been thought through by the War Office. Adjutants were immediately returned to their regular battalions (and often as promptly killed in action), and this, Nicholson reflected, was: ‘a blow from which the Territorial divisions did not recover for many months … It is very easy to be wise after the event, but in this case no great wisdom was necessary.’¹²⁶

And there was also the question of the County Associations. These did not control the Territorial Force once it was mobilised, but their responsibility for the supply of some equipment led to frequent difficulties. Nicholson’s servant was a regular soldier, and so could not draw equipment from the association, but had to apply for a new shirt to his old company of 1/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, by then in the trenches in France, which was palpably absurd. Procedures for pay and allowance were not the same as those in the regular army, and as Nicholson saw first-hand, many territorials were paid less by the army than they had been in civilian life, and got into difficulties. One officer on the divisional staff: ‘was for ever digging deeper and deeper into his capital to keep his business going in the East End, till the war slowly froze him out. He had no time away from his military duties, save to sign his money away.’¹²⁷

The legislative defence against incorporating territorials, individually or collectively, in units other than the ones they had joined, which had made good sense to Haldane and his associates prior to 1908, was far less logical during a major war. It caused constant problems as men complained to their MPs that they were being transferred against their will or their units were being broken up; in 1919 the War Office felt compelled to issue a formal defence of its actions.¹²⁸ Lastly, the Territorial Force had been formed for home defence, and it was not immediately clear what the extent of the German threat to the mainland of the United Kingdom would actually be: even Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, admitted that ‘the period of maximum danger’ would extend until early 1915.

On 13 August 1914 Kitchener told Lord Esher that he was perfectly happy to use territorials either to reinforce the New Armies or to release regulars from overseas garrisons. But he had already decided that he would deviate from Haldane’s concept of using the territorials as a basis for military expansion. He would bypass the Territorial Force, with its different terms of service and County Associations, and raise troops through the adjutant general’s branch in the War Office.¹²⁹ In August 1914, therefore, a young man wishing to join the army had three choices. He could become a regular on pre-war terms of service: the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and Royal Military College Sandhurst, for instance, continued to train regular officers throughout the war. Or he could become a territorial, accepting or declining foreign service. Lastly, he could become a regular for the duration of the war by joining the New Armies, so intimately linked to their instigator as to be called Kitchener’s Armies.

His decision would be influenced by a number of factors. Many (but by no means all) local authorities, as we have seen in Accrington, threw their weight behind the New Armies. There was a widely-held belief – so marked that New Army recruiting meetings were occasionally disrupted by jealous serving territorials – that the New Armies would get abroad first, and the young and bold often chose to join them for that reason. But on the other hand, some of the cautious and far-sighted deduced that by enlisting in the Territorial Force but (crucially) not accepting liability for foreign service they were more likely to survive the war. That this was likely to produce an avoidable muddle is beyond question. Rather than joining in the rush to blame Kitchener, autocratic, opinionated and obdurate though he was, we might more reasonably criticise a government which had not put in place a mechanism for raising troops to meet the demands of the continental war in which its foreign policy was likely to involve it.

It was Kitchener’s achievement to give Britain an army capable of meeting the demands of war on an unprecedented scale. Just over 5,700,000 men served in the army during the war, almost two million more than in the Second World War, and the army of 1914–18 was ‘the most complex single organisation created by the British nation up to that time’. Just under half its men were volunteers: by the end of 1915, 2,466,719 had voluntarily enlisted, more than the nation was able to obtain by conscription in 1916 and 1917 combined, and the number of conscripts enlisted in 1918 was only 30,000 more than the number of volunteers enlisting in September 1914 alone.¹³⁰

On 6 August 1914 Kitchener sought parliamentary approval for increasing the size of the army by 500,000 men, and the following day newspapers carried appeals for ‘an addition of 100,000 men to His Majesty’s Regular Army …’. Volunteers were to be between nineteen and thirty years old, and were to sign on for three years or the duration of the war. Five days later the War Office gave details of the ‘First New Army’, or K1, which was to comprise six complete divisions: the infantry component, by far the bulk of the force, was, as we have seen, to form ‘service’ battalions of existing regiments.¹³¹ On the first day of the appeal, 7 August, The Times reported that the press of men outside the Central London Recruiting Office in Great Scotland Yard was so big that mounted police had to hold it in check. Although there was no wild cheering or excitement there was, perhaps more tellingly in the British context, an ‘undercurrent of enthusiasm’, and those who failed their medical examination were obviously disappointed. One former officer in the Rifle Brigade was so mortified at being found unfit for service that he shot himself.

Extra recruiting offices were opened to make the process quicker, and extra clerks and doctors were found to speed up the bureaucracy of attestation and medical examination. The campaign gained momentum in its second week, and Tuesday 19 August set the record, thus far, for a single day with 9,699 enlistments. News from the front, where the BEF had just fought the battle of Mons, coupled with steadily-improving procedures brought in more than 63,000 men in the week beginning 25 August. On 28 August Kitchener appealed for another 100,000 men. Although he initially intended to use these troops to reinforce the rapidly-forming divisions of K1, it was soon decided to form another New Army, K2.¹³² There had already been a flurry of complaints in the press about fit men excluded by the previous limits (Admiral Sir William Kennedy gruffly told The Times that his butler, a fine shot, had been rejected because he was thirty-two), and so the upper age limit was increased to thirty-five for men without prior service, forty-five for ex-soldiers and fifty for ex-senior NCOs.

The widening of age limits, improved procedures, and the establishment of a Parliamentary Recruiting Committee to help the government bring together all the agencies involved, all helped. The alarmist ‘Amiens dispatch’ which appeared in The Times on 30 August – greatly overstating the damage incurred by the BEF on the retreat from Mons – persuaded many that there was a very real need, and numerous firms generously agreed to supplement the army pay of men who enlisted. Recruits flooded in, establishing records which were not to be broken for the rest of the war: on Thursday 3 September 1914, a staggering 33,204 men (equivalent to almost one-third the strength of the BEF in France) joined the army. Having formally declared the creation of the 2nd New Army on 11 September, the War Office quickly agreed to a 3rd and then a 4th New Army.¹³³ The 5th and final New Army was sanctioned in October: in less than three months Kitchener had laid the foundation for no less than thirty new divisions.¹³⁴ It was an achievement wholly without precedent in British history.

If Kitchener’s achievement was unprecedented, the army’s radical expansion was wholly unplanned. There were no weapons, uniforms or equipment for most of these men; few experienced officers and NCOs who could train them; no proper living accommodation, cookhouses or medical centres; too few rifle and artillery ranges; no draught animals, harness or vehicles; and no commanders and staff for the new divisions or the brigades that made them up. Raising and training the New Armies represented improvisation on a staggering scale. It is worth contemplating the result of a comparable increase in other professions. School registers would quadruple in size, though accommodation would not, and long-retired teachers would join untrained newcomers in the classroom. Three-men-and-a-truck London building firms would each receive a hundred new workers (many of them fishermen from the Western Isles) and be invited to embark upon complex construction projects for which no materials were yet available. And small-town banks would be invited to take on three dozen new staff, many of them innumerate and a few unreliable, to finance complex local ventures being run by the inexperienced, the overambitious and the idle.

It had never been easier to get a commission in the Special Reserve, New Armies or territorials: a young man simply had to find a commanding officer who was prepared to take him on. When F. P. Roe was at his school’s OTC camp in July 1914 his contingent commander handed out applications for temporary commissions with names already filled out: they simply required signatures. ‘We all of us signed,’ he recalled,

and the forms were dispatched to the War Office the same day. Understandably, in view of the fact that the same sort of procedure was going on all over Britain we heard nothing at all … With determined disregard for the usual channels and with renewed enthusiasm I sent a telegram to the War Office: ‘Have been accepted for a commission in the 6th (Territorial) Battalion The Gloucestershire Regiment.’ I later read in The Times of 1 October a copy of The London Gazette appointing me to a commission as a second lieutenant in that unit. Later on our early applications must have caught up for I was antedated in my rank to 31st July 1914 on my birthday … Much later I received the parchment of my actual commission.¹³⁵

C. H. Gaskell, with the benefit of OTC experience, simply went to Bulford Camp on his motor bike ‘to see what could be done in the way of getting a commission in the army’. Having failed to strike gold there, he roared on to the Wiltshire Regiment’s depot in Devizes, where he presented himself ‘to Col Stewart who treated me with great kindness and seemed hopeful of getting me a commission right away’. Two days later he was in 3/Wiltshire, the Special Reserve battalion, under the congenial command of Lord Heytesbury. ‘We had a few parades to attend, some trench digging, and an odd lecture or two,’ he wrote, ‘with plenty of time off for bathing and having tea in the town and singsongs in the evening.’ In a month he was in France, commanding a platoon in 1/Wiltshire on the Aisne. As he went into the line for the first time one of his men shouted ‘Are we downhearted?’ and a weary soldier on his way out replied ‘No, but you bloody soon will be.’¹³⁶

In September 1914 Graham Greenwell, instantly commissioned into the infantry, told his mother that: ‘I am having great fun and enjoying it all immensely.’ The only setback, though, he wrote, was that: ‘I can’t get a sword or a revolver for love or money, though Harrods are getting me one.’¹³⁷ One fond mother earnestly advertised in The Times for a loan to buy a revolver for her officer son, promising donors that the best possible references supported her application. North Whitehead feared that his mother might not be so supportive. He wrote from Rugby school that he was persuaded, ‘not only by the leader writers but by letters written by officers’, that all able-bodied men really should join. He knew that she would worry about him, but assured her that:

our navy will play the chief part in our share of the war.

A man who has just joined the army is nearly useless at first, although I can handle a service rifle …

Darling Mummy, remember that in all probability I shall never go beyond the drill ground & that if I do I shall in all probability never be more than a reserve.

He was commissioned into the Army Service Corps, Special Reserve and was in France by the month’s end. ‘The officers who have just got their commissions owing to the war are markedly less pleasant than the regular officers who are simply charming,’ he wrote. ‘In active service the relations between officers of different ranks is much easier than in peacetime.’ There were some pleasant surprises. ‘It is almost impossible to pay for anything in the shops, they want to make a gift of everything,’ and: ‘The foreign soldiers all salute one as if their lives depended on it.’¹³⁸

Family connections were useful. Julian Tyndale-Biscoe was at OTC camp on Cannock Chase when war broke out, and gleefully reported that there was a huge inter-fight to celebrate the news. When the guard charged the offenders in an attempt to restore order, ‘they were soon thrown to the ground and parted from their rifles and hats’. He wired his cousin Victor, commanding King Edward’s Horse, who replied: ‘Regiment full strength – join something.’ His uncle Albert, commanding a brigade of field artillery at Woolwich, suggested that he apply for a regular commission in the gunners. But the war, he thought, might be over by then, so instead he wrote to the War Office. There was a brief interview: ‘When he heard that I had Certificate A and was in the shooting eight, etc, etc, he gave a grunt and told me that he would arrange for me to be gazetted in the next week or so.’¹³⁹

Tyndale-Biscoe happily went off in his OTC uniform with hasty alterations to the sleeve for his new badges of rank. But he received a rude shock when he joined his battery at Deepcut in Surrey.

Where were the guns and horses? All I could see was a large crowd of men in their civilian clothes marching unendingly to the voice of various sergeants, on a gravel square, much to the detriment of their boots. The Major said, ‘Here is the Battery — I want you to train these men.’ When I told him that I had no artillery training, he said ‘Oh, that does not matter, you just watch the others do it, and do it yourself;

He managed to get posted to Woolwich for some proper training, and the other officers he met typified the young men commissioned by these rough and ready methods. ‘I have met a lot of nice fellows here,’ he told his father. ‘Apart from Paul, there are two from Cambridge – one shared the same staircase at Jesus with Harold [his brother] and the other who is in my battery stroked the Trinity boat.’ Posted back to a battery at Aldershot with some decent training under his belt, he found that he had fallen into the clutches of a battery commander of the horsier persuasion. ‘I don’t believe in all these angles and things,’ he announced. ‘What I say is – “Gallop up to the top of the hill and poop off”.’¹⁴⁰

On 1 December 1914 Second Lieutenant Jim Mackie of 2/4th Somerset Light Infantry, himself only commissioned in September that year, told his brother Andrew:

I heard the Colonel saying this morning that he wanted one more subaltern so I at once approached him and said that I had a younger brother who would like to join. He jumped at the idea at once and said that he should be delighted to have a younger brother of mine in the regiment …

I asked you to send your birth certificate and medical certificate tonight because the Colonel is sending to the War Office to-morrow & if your certificates are sent up you will get gazetted more quickly … As the Colonel has definitely decided to take you, you need not wait till you are gazetted before you get your uniform but can begin at once.¹⁴¹

When the battalion sailed for India there were three Mackie brothers in its officers mess.

In August 1914, Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister, enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles and was speedily commissioned into a New Army battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Sir Thomas Pilkington, his CO,

with his white hair, rubicund complexion, and aquiline nose … was a figure from the past. He treated us with kindness, but seemed somewhat surprised at the strange collection of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of which he was the Chief … I can see him now, with well-cut uniform, smart polished boots, and spurs, gazing mournfully at a number of men – some of whom had tunics but civilian trousers, others with khaki trousers but civilian coats – all constituting a formation of troops which must have struck him as extremely unlikely ever to become soldiers.¹⁴²

It struck young Harold that he could get to France quicker with a better regiment, and after an interview with the regimental lieutenant colonel found himself translated to 3/Grenadier Guards, whose legacy never left him. ‘I have preserved the habit of being five minutes early for appointments,’ he acknowledged in later life.

This spate of commissioning went on into 1915. Bernard Martin, still at school, was summoned by his headmaster to be told:

‘You, and some of your friends, will be interested in a War Office pronouncement that I’ve just received. The regular Army has a Special Reserve of Officers; something to do with filling unexpected vacancies in the Indian Army … Applications for commissions in this reserve are now invited from school cadet corps members. It is not like Kitchener’s Army volunteers, serving for the duration. These special reserve commissions are permanent …’. He picked up a paper from his desk. ‘Applicants must be recommended by someone of good standing who has known the applicants personally for at least three years. The age limit is eighteen.’

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

‘Nineteen for Kitchener’s Army,’ he explained. ‘The Special Reserve for Officers is eighteen …’ So a miracle came to pass. On the 25th April 1915, one day after my eighteenth birthday, I was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the reserve battalion of the 64th Regiment of Foot in the regular army, an infantry regiment which boasted a long list of battle honours …¹⁴³

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

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

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

He was killed at Delville Wood on 18 August, and never knew that he had won the Military Medal, gazetted the following February.¹⁴⁴

Richard Henry Tawney, a devout Christian, socialist and distinguished economic historian, enlisted in a New Army battalion of the Manchesters at the age of thirty-four, also declined a commission and was wounded as a sergeant on the Somme. A general visited him while he was in hospital and warned the sister in charge of his ward that she was looking after a national treasure. Shocked, she asked Tawney why he had not told her that he was a gentleman. Leslie Coulson, assistant editor of the Morning Post, joined 2/2nd London in 1914, refusing to apply for a commission. ‘No, I will do the thing fairly,’ he declared. ‘I will take my place on the ranks.’¹⁴⁵ He fought in Gallipoli, and was then transferred to 12/London. By now a sergeant, and recommended for the commission he felt he had to earn, he was killed when 56th Division assaulted Leuze Wood on 7 October 1916. By then he had established himself as a poet of some distinction and, like so many poets, expressed a rage in his writing that was absent from his military persona.

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?

Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

Who gave it forth that gardens should be boneyards?

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

Even more volunteers wanted to stay in the ranks because that was where their friends were. Some units, like many of the London battalions constituting 33rd Division, were filled with men who might more naturally have been officers. The division included five public school battalions, 18/ to 21/Royal Fusiliers and 16/Middlesex; an ‘Empire’ and a Kensington battalion of the Royal Fusiliers; a West Ham battalion (13/Essex); the 1st Football Battalion (properly 17/Middlesex); and the Church Lads’ Battalion (16/King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Even the divisional pioneer battalion, best, if bluntly, described as military navvies, was 1st Public Works (18/Middlesex).¹⁴⁶ The Sportsmen’s Battalion (23/Royal Fusiliers) included in its ranks two England cricketers, the country’s lightweight boxing champion and the former lord mayor of Exeter. A member of the unit described his hut in the battalion’s camp at Hornchurch:

In this hut the first bed was occupied by the brother of a peer. In the second the man who formerly drove his motor-car. Both had enlisted at the same time at the Hotel Cecil … Other beds in the hut were occupied by a mechanical engineer, an old Blundell School boy, planters, a mine overseer from Scotland, … a photographer, a poultry farmer, an old sea dog who had rounded Cape Horn on no fewer than nine occasions, a man who had hunted seals, a bank clerk, and so on. It must not be thought that this hut was an exceptional one. Every hut was practically the same, and every hut was jealous of its reputation.¹⁴⁷

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

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

Hmm … Shirt off, trousers down … mmm … Cough … mmm … Not very tall … mmm … Scales over there … mmm … Silly business war … mmm … Just ten stone … shouldn’t have thought it … Hmm … Chest measurement … mmm … expand … mmm … Blast the Germans anyway … mmm … two-and-a-half inches … elastic lungs … mmm … try the Navy next time … Hmm … Mouth open … wider … mmm … Say aahhh … mmm … ninety-nine … mmmmm … General Service … Next man, Corporal … mmm. I took my shilling and departed.¹⁴⁸

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

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

… Tread light o’er the dead in the valley

Who are lying around, face down to the groundsheet

And they can’t hear me sounding the Rally …

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

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

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

Our Scottish infantry created an enormous impression on our minds. Never again was I to see so many thousands of splendid men, the very heart and soul of the nation. These were they who, on the outbreak of war, had rushed to enlist, the best and first of Kitchener’s New Armies. And here we saw them, bronzed and dignified, regiments of young gods.¹⁴⁹

The Camerons went into action at Loos 820 strong and emerged with two officers and seventy men: Lance Corporal Andrew, himself wounded, saw Regimental Sergeant Major Peter Scotland standing over the commanding officer and asked if he should fetch stretcher-bearers. ‘It’s no good,’ said the RSM, ‘the old man’s dying.’ Andrew at last felt able to take a commission and, while convalescing, wrote to the commanding officer of 5/Scottish Rifles, who agreed to take him. ‘A man of means’ thanks to his outfit allowance, he went to the best tailor in Glasgow for his uniform, but when he reported for duty at Catterick he discovered that ‘second lieutenants were two a penny’.¹⁵⁰

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

The divisional pioneer battalion, T’owd Twelfth (one of several northern battalions to use that name), was 12/King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, many of them miners from Charlesworth Pit who had streamed into Leeds to enlist in 1914.¹⁵¹ Its composition underlines another important point about the New Armies. Many volunteers came from working-class areas with a tradition of industrial militancy: these were not the products of a cowed, deferential society. But by mid-1915 over 230,000 miners, about one-quarter of the workforce, had volunteered. ‘The compatibility of class consciousness and patriotism,’ observed J. M. Winter, ‘could have no better illustration. Of course, we should never completely discount the desire of some miners to get out of the mines, but sentiments about nation and empire rather than discontent, were behind mass enlistment in the industry.’¹⁵²

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

I should like to see a Welsh Army in the field. I should like to see the race who faced the Normans for hundreds of years in their struggle for freedom, the race that helped to win the battle of Crecy, the race that fought for a generation under Glendower against the greatest captain in Europe – I should like to see that race give a good taste of its quality in this struggle.¹⁵³

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

It was soon clear that there would be too few volunteers to raise a full corps, and in December the single division that could be brought to full manning was called 43rd (Welsh), and renumbered 38th (Welsh) in April 1915. Local politics was generally well to the fore when it came to raising the New Armies: indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. But several factors, such as Welsh nationalism, concerns about the impact of Nonconformity with its strong element of pacifism, and the personality of Lloyd George, all played a greater than usual part in colouring the composition of 38th Division. One of Lloyd George’s sons was aide de camp to the divisional commander, and some senior commanders owed their selection more to their political backing than their military ability. And the division seems to have suffered more than most from the slow arrival of its equipment, another consequence of the army’s rapid expansion: 16/Welsh (Cardiff City) received its first eighty working rifles in August 1915, and it was not until October that enough rifles were available for men to fire at their range course at Winchester prior to embarking for France. The divisional artillery had no horses till April that year, and even then its gunners were still drilling on tent poles mounted on wheels.¹⁵⁴

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

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

A message was now on its way to some quiet village in Wales, to a grey farmhouse on the slope of a hill running down to Cardigan Bay, or to a miner’s cottage in a South Wales valley, a word of death …¹⁵⁵

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

At the very end of the fighting in the wood the division’s Welshness was still painfully evident. ‘I crouched with some men to shelter,’ recalled Griffith. ‘We talked in Welsh, for they were Anglesey folk; one was a young boy, and after a thunderous crash in our ears he began to cry out for his mother, in a thin boyish voice, “mam, mam…”¹⁵⁶ The division lost over 4,000 men, and was so badly jarred that it was not engaged in another major battle till the first day of Third Ypres, 31 July 1917. It suffered 28,635 casualties in the whole of the war, but somehow Mametz Wood is the right place for its memorial, a proud red dragon glaring out across Happy Valley towards the blank-faced wood and Flat Iron Copse Cemetery full of the division’s dead, with ripped-up barbed wire in its claws.¹⁵⁷

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

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

undertaken in defence of the highest principles of religion and morality and right, and it would be a disgrace for ever to our country, and a regret to her manhood, and a denial of the lessons of history, if young Ireland continued her efforts to remain at home to defend the shores of Ireland from military invasion, and shirk from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race across its history.¹⁵⁸

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

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

Ulstermen, too, faced a dilemma when war broke out. The Ulster Volunteer Force was 80,000 strong, and many of its units, organised on British military lines, were well armed and well drilled. There were initial doubts about throwing the considerable weight of the UVF behind the British government (against which it might so easily have found itself fighting), but these were soon resolved after discussions between Kitchener and Sir Edward Carson, the Unionist leader. The formation of what was to become 36th (Ulster) Division began in September 1914, and many of its battalions were firmly based on units of the UVF. Frank Crozier had been forced to leave the army in 1908 after bouncing cheques, which one astute commentator has called ‘a lifelong habit’. In 1914 he was, as he put it, ‘a hired mercenary’ training Carson’s UVF, and was quickly re-commissioned into the British army to be second in command to ‘my Shankhill Road boys’, now transmuted into 9/Royal Irish Rifles. Before the transition was complete he watched a regular battalion of the Norfolks leave for France, seen off by a guard of honour of the UVF’s West Belfast Regiment. ‘Five months previously,’ mused Crozier, ‘these very men of the Norfolks had quitted Belfast for Holyrood, owing to the menace in their midst of the very men who were doing them honour now, and from whom they evidently felt disposed to accept the compliment.’¹⁵⁹

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

Yet we must be careful not to jam 10th and 16th Divisions on the one hand, and 36th on the other, into the obvious political niches. Some Irish regiments (notably the Royal Irish Rifles) had always recruited both Catholics and Protestants, and there was more than a little sense of a deep and common Irishness that expunged more superficial divides. ‘Once we tacitly agreed to let the past be buried,’ observed an officer in 10th Division, ‘we found thousands of points on which we agreed.’ The same music could speak to both. When the pipes of the Royal Irish howled out Brian Bora, that tune ‘traditionally played by some Irish Regiments to lift hearts and square shoulders’, in the assault on Guillemont on 15 September 1916, a man did not have to come from the South to feel his spirits soar. And when a northern-raised battalion of Irish Rifles met a southern battalion on the march with its band playing the old rebel air She’s The Most Distressful Country, there were cheers of approval.¹⁶⁰

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

He received every possible kindness from Ulster soldiers. In fact, an Englishman attached to the Ulster Division expressed some surprise at the extreme care that was taken of the poor Major, though no Irish soldier expected anything else, for, after all, Ulstermen are Irish too.¹⁶¹

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

We couldn’t possibly agree with his religious opinions, but we worshipped him for other things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he didn’t know what bigotry was. He was as ready to risk his life to take a drop of water to a wounded Ulsterman as to assist men of his own faith and regiment. If he risked his life looking after Ulster Protestant soldiers once, he did it a hundred times in the last few days. The Ulstermen felt his loss more keenly than anybody and none were readier to show their marks of respect to the dead hero priest than were our Ulster Presbyterians. Father Doyle was a true Christian in every sense of the word, and a credit to any religious faith …¹⁶²

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

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

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

‘What regiment do you wish to join?’

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

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

‘No, I want to be a soldier.’

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

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

He at last admitted that the 12th Battalion was not yet quite up to establishment, and I was seen out into the street again, the King’s shilling and 2/9d, one day’s subsistence money and pay rattling in my pocket, and holding in my hand a railway warrant to carry me to Warley Barracks on the morrow.¹⁶³

The Rain brothers, trying to enlist in a regiment of their choice before conscription overwhelmed them in early 1917, found it even harder. They were too short for the Royal Marine Artillery. Rejected by a Territorial Royal Field Artillery battery at Islington, they went on to try RFA units at Moorgate and Camberwell ‘besides several others’. They managed to pass the medical at Woolwich and then ‘by means of tips’ secured a promise to be enlisted into the Royal Horse Artillery. But they turned out to be too young for that: and the Field Artillery there was full too. Eventually they struck lucky with the Queen’s Westminsters, even if the stew they were served for dinner was ‘so unwholesome that we were unable to eat it’. It was a happy choice, for their training battalion was still sending men to its 1st Battalion in France, and there was a real sense of family feeling and, by this stage in the war, no shortages of weapons or accommodation. Their company commander, Captain Gordon, ‘was an officer of exceptional popularity’, soon to be killed at Cambrai.¹⁶⁴

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

A wave of fear seemed to have spread over the country and young men not in uniform were presented with white feathers by young women (also not in uniform). Men over forty, thinking themselves safe behind ‘important’ jobs, urged those to enlist who were too young to have anything to lose but their lives. The elderly and painfully religious couple whose lodger I was were cold to me, loudly praising Ted Pullen who, as the newspapers had it, had gallantly ‘placed his young life at the service of the Nation’. My fellow lodger, no less liable to military service than I was, openly asked me why I didn’t enlist. I answered nobody, for my own thoughts were forming.¹⁶⁵

In September 1914 Clifford de Boltz was ‘accosted by a young lady in Great Portland Street’ and presented with a white feather. ‘I felt quite embarrassed,’ he admitted, ‘and threw the feather away in great disgust.’ But he enlisted in 2/6th Norfolk, a territorial cyclist battalion, soon afterwards. The battalion was already straining its resources, and he spent his first night in the army on a pub billiard table, and regretted that: ‘it went on like this for days and nobody seemed to know what to do next’. As his was a territorial battalion there was at least some uniform, but ‘whether it fitted or not did not seem to matter to them but we all felt very uncomfortable. Boots – asked for size 5. CQMS “we haven’t got any bloody boy’s boots, take these size 7 and wear three pairs of socks and you will be alright”.’¹⁶⁶

Much depended on what men joined, and falling into the dark maw of a freshly-raised New Army unit, with few trained officers or NCOs, no proper accommodation, no clear sense of regional identity and pre-war kinship, was probably the worst fate. Bill Sugden told his future wife Amy on 28 October 1914: ‘Well, I’ve done it now and am a regular soldier in the RFA. I write in the Main Railway Station Sheffield having got my ticket for Newhaven and am proceeding there. I am afraid with all the excitement my hand is somewhat shaky.’¹⁶⁷ On arrival he found that:

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

Sardines and bread for breakfast and we had to fight for it. The food is very roughly served. The other fellows have to eat their meat with their fingers which I would most certainly have to do was it not for my little darling’s knife and fork.¹⁶⁸

Soon he was reporting that: ‘The life is harder than an outsider would believe,’ with incessant rain, wet blankets, and fatigues like peeling potatoes and emptying urinal buckets, ‘a rotten filthy job’. Press reports of German conduct in Belgium, though, filled him with anger and determination. ‘The outrages on women and children in Belgium have been terrible,’ he wrote. ‘Fancy if Amy had to fall into their hands … I only hope I shall have the chance to have a smash in return for the way our men have been treated, hands cut off and wounded shot.’¹⁶⁹ Training seemed both pointless and brutal. ‘Our sergeant major is an absolute pig,’ he declared.

He swears and strikes the men … It is a cowardly thing to do as he knows the men dare not strike back … It makes my blood boil when I see it, and if he ever kicks or strikes me I shall go for him whatever the consequences and half kill him before they get me off … They seem to forget we have all given up our jobs to do our best for the country, and do not expect to be treated like a lot of rifraf.¹⁷⁰

In November he wondered ‘why this Army is without system. If the names of 2 or 3 have to be called out they will have the whole regiment on parade for 2 hours. We are always waiting. Wait, wait, wait and always in the rain.’¹⁷¹ ‘All the men are keen to get on with their duty and it seems a dispiriting thing to me the way we are held back by silly fools of officers,’ he wrote on 1 December. ‘These men have bought their commissions. They are wealthy, brainless fools.’¹⁷² Things picked up when he was sent to Tynemouth for gun training, and when 21st Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery formed there he was already a trained signaller: ‘It’s quite a classy job and the best educated men are naturally picked out for it.’ He was promoted steadily, and in early 1917 announced from France that he was now ‘the only New Army man in the battery who has risen to the rank of sergeant … We have many regulars and I have been promoted over their heads.’¹⁷³ Eventually selected for officer training, he was commissioned in April 1919.

Other private soldiers echoed Bill Sugden’s chief complaints: bad living conditions and poor food, and training and discipline that seemed inappropriate for citizen soldiers eager to learn a new trade. And experienced officers admitted that it was difficult to make bricks without straw. Captain Rory Baynes, just back from the Royal West African Frontier Force, was sent off to train a New Army Cameronian battalion. His men were an odd mixture, with an early batch of ‘pretty rough’ unemployed, then a batch who had just given up their jobs, and then a good sprinkling of ex-NCOs. They had no rifles and drilled with broomsticks. ‘You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat,’ he wrote, ‘next to someone else in a red coat and some civilian trousers.’ He thought that the battalion had reached a reasonable standard by early 1915 when he was passed on the march by two companies of the regular 1/Cameronians and ‘saw immediately that our standard of NCOs and everything else was far below what it really should be’.¹⁷⁴

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

I did not believe that Britain was in any real danger. I was sorry for ‘gallant little Belgium’ but did not feel as if she was waiting for me to rescue her. The legend of Kitchener, who pointed out at us from every hoarding, had never captured me. I was not under any pressure from public opinion; the white feathers came later. I was not carried to the recruiting office in a herd of chums, nobody thinking, everybody half-plastered. I went alone.¹⁷⁵

He shared the familiar misery of tented camps, ‘sleeping twelve to a bell-tent, kneeling after Lights Out to piss in our boots and then emptying them under the flap. The old soldiers told us that this was good for our boots, making them easier for route-marches’.¹⁷⁶ And like so many New Army men he resented his Kitchener Blue, ‘a doleful convict-style blue outfit with a ridiculous little forage cap and a civilian overcoat’. But as khaki uniforms arrived, the weather improved and the battalion knitted together, he too felt the pride of arms which coursed through the New Armies in the spring of 1915. ‘We looked like soldiers now,’ he wrote.

All four battalions had a band; and along all the route we were waved at and cheered, not foolishly either, for an infantry brigade marching in full equipment with its bands booming and clashing is an impressive spectacle. This was my idea of soldiering – constant movement, unknown destinations, fluttering handkerchiefs and cheers – and I enjoyed it hugely, sore feet and bully beef and trips on hard ground and all.¹⁷⁷

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

Not all the flesh and blood required by the burgeoning army was human, however. The army needed huge quantities of horses. In 1914 it sent a strong cavalry division to France, with almost 10,000 horses, and each of the infantry divisions required nearly 6,000 to pull its guns and wagons and to mount its senior officers. There were 25,000 horses on the army’s strength in August 1914, and at least another 120,000 were required to meet immediate demands. Because the army’s peacetime requirement for horses was so small, Britain had no state breeding programme, but bought about a thousand horses a year from the trade. Most cavalry horses were ‘of hunter stamp. Height 15.2 hands, cost £40 in Ireland, a black gelding’. The Household Cavalry needed something bigger, ‘A real nice-looking heavyweight horse with plenty of bone,’ which was likely to cost £65 as a four year old.¹⁷⁸

The Boer War had already shown that the army could not hope to rely on normal commercial channels to obtain horses on mobilisation, and in 1914 its purchasing officers were equipped with justice’s warrants which entitled them to obtain horses by compulsory purchase. Most tried to pay sensible sums (£70 was the guideline for an officer’s charger), neither overspending nor robbing the sellers. B. E. Todhunter mounted B Squadron of the Essex Yeomanry, travelling over 900 miles to get all the horses he required. ‘Essex has been pretty well skinned of her horses,’ he told the remount officer in Brentwood on 14 August, ‘and I had to go poaching in Suffolk before I could get the six I sent you yesterday.’¹⁷⁹ But not all purchasing officers were as astute. Irish dealers unloaded some questionable stock, 12 percent of which had to be sold on immediately as unsuitable.

Many private individuals, hunt stables and corporations gave up their horses voluntarily. The historian of 11th Hussars recorded that: ‘Colonel Pitman’s brother sent eight hunters all of which came through the war successfully. The master of the Meynell Hunt sent a number of hunt horses, and others came from Mr Fernie’s and the Pytchley.’ Weymouth Corporation was so generous with its omnibus horses that there were too few left to pull the buses. But most horses were compulsorily purchased. Captain James Jack of the Cameronians had already been mobilised when he heard that his two remaining hunters, ‘Ardskull Boy and Home Park, have been taken for the army – the first war wrench’. When remount sergeants visited the Buckinghamshire village of Tysoe in August: ‘Every farmhouse … had some shock and grief that day.’ Kathleen Ashby’s family lost their much-loved aged carthorse Captain, who was still useful ‘if you humoured him and knocked off promptly after his stint of work, but under new men and at hard tasks he must break down’.¹⁸⁰ The disappearance of Sammy and Rob Roy, Titan and Jupiter, cast an early shadow over a land still unused to loss, and some families, proud that their boys should go, could not bear to lose their animals. Three Lancashire children, ‘troubled little Britishers’, wrote to ‘Dear good Lord Kitchener’ with a picture of their pony and begged that she might be spared. Two others had already gone, and three of the family were ‘now fighting for you in the Navy. Mother and I will do anything for you, but do, do please let us keep old Betty.’ Kitchener’s private secretary, no less, immediately replied that he had spoken to Kitchener and ‘if you show the enclosed note to anyone who asks about your pony he thinks it will be left to you quite safely’.¹⁸¹

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

An enormous horse depot was formed at the Curragh racecourse to hold wonderful animals requisitioned from all over … Ireland, a sight never to be forgotten in that green land of horses. We young officers had great fun picking our requirements, and it was a great time for anyone with an eye for a horse.¹⁸²

Henry Owens, a hunting doctor instantly commissioned into the RAMC, collected ‘a nice horse, a long-tailed bay, well bred, nice mouth and manners and nice paces’.¹⁸³ And Major Tom Bridges of the 4th Dragoon Guards secured ‘one Umslopagaas, a powerful weight-carrying hunter with a wall eye, who could jump railway gates’.¹⁸⁴ The unlucky Private Garrod, however, lost his favourite horse, who had to be destroyed when she broke a leg, and was allocated the worst horse in the troop, ‘who was such a bastard that he was known as Syphilis’ because nobody wanted to catch him. He kicked out and broke the farrier sergeant major’s arm when the horses were being embarked at Southampton, and then reared back ‘over the dock into the water and was never seen again’.

By June 1915, long before it began to conscript men, the army had taken 8 percent of the heavy horses in use on the land, and 25 percent of saddle horses had gone from farms. At one point in 1917 the army had nearly a million animals on its strength, with 436,000 of them in France. It is small wonder that fodder was, by a narrow margin, the heaviest single item shipped to France, heavier even than ammunition. The pressing need to supply and feed horses helped break down the barriers that had hitherto kept women, apart from nurses, out of uniform. The Women’s Forage Corps, which had 6,000 members by 1918, worked at baling and transporting hay, and the Women’s Remount Depot played a valuable part in breaking in newly-bought horses. There were the inevitable suggestions that women would not be up to the heavy work, but, in the event, they did it very well, freeing men for military service. Edith Maudslay, a farmer’s daughter, joined the Women’s Remount Depot in 1915, worried about her gunner brother (reported missing in March 1918 after returning alone to his battery’s gun-line to try to amend the day’s fortunes with his revolver), and lived on to drive an ambulance in the London Blitz in the Second World War.¹⁸⁵