Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  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

  The sheer weight of fodder shipped to France must not be used as evidence of the logistic burden imposed by the cavalry. By 1917 only about 27,000 of the British horses on the Western Front (falling to some 16,000 by early 1918) mounted the remaining cavalry. The overwhelming majority pulled guns or wagons, just as they did in the French, German and United States armies at that time. In December 1918 the BEF fed a total of 394,443 animals. Of these just 25,414, riding and draught horses, were in the Cavalry Corps, and 48,822 served on the lines of communication. The number of motor vehicles on the Western Front grew enormously: in August 1914 the Army Service Corps had just 507 motor vehicles at
its disposal, and in January 1918 it had almost 22,000 trucks in France alone. However, for the average infantry soldier ‘transport’ invariably meant horse transport, usually the 30-cwt General Service wagon, drawn by two horses, whose load might comprise 100 blankets, twenty double tents, four hospital marquees, forty-five boxes of small arms ammunition or 900 groundsheets.

  Nobody who has had much to do with the horse can deny the beast’s extraordinary perversity. Lieutenant Alan Lascelles of the Bedfordshire Yeomanry admitted that:

  He debars you from spending the night anywhere in the neighbourhood of civilisation, because he takes up such a lot of room, so that where you have hoped for a roof, you get only a bivouac; he keeps you standing about two hours longer than you need after a long march, because he is unable to clean or feed himself, and will leave you altogether unless firmly secured; he drags you miles, two or three times a day, through mud that he has churned up with his feet and then refuses to drink at the end of it; he wears a mass of impedimenta with an unlimited capacity for getting dirty and unserviceable; he will bite or kick you on the smallest provocation, and at night he will keep honest men from their beds, because, unless closely watched, he will either hang himself or savage his neighbour.186

  Yet men grew very fond of their horses, and it was a commonplace for men, inured to the passing of their human friends, to record their grief at the death of horses. An unnamed poet in 156th Heavy Battery RGA lamented the loss of the battery’s ‘pet’, ‘Billy the Stallion, killed by Hostile Aircraft, 5 July 1917.’

  He was only a bloomin’ heavy,

  Only a battery horse,

  But if there’s a heaven for horses

  Billy will not be lost …

  Third Ypres was in full swing, and the army was losing thousands of men every day, but 156th Battery remembered a long-faced chum. In a base hospital the Reverend Charles Doudney talked to a young Canadian who had lost ‘his nose, one eye, all one cheek, upper jaw on one side’. Despite these terrible wounds, he had not left his horse, hit by the same shell: ‘His fore leg was smashed, so I could not leave him. Had him all the time since we left Canada.’187 Only with the horse mercifully shot did he deliver his urgent demand for more ammunition. And only then did he seek medical aid. Captain Sidney Rogerson, gratefully out of the line on the Somme in 1916, saw his battalion HQ wagon, ‘drawn by the two beautiful chestnuts which were the apple of the driver’s eye and which I am last to see side by side in death as in life beside the bridge at Pontavert in May 1918’.188 Old army or New, it never lost this tug of sentiment, and is none the worse for that.

  III

  BRAIN AND NERVE

  CHAIN OF COMMAND

  Whatever segment of the army Thomas Atkins joined, his world was defined by his unit. And this, for the majority of soldiers, meant the infantry battalion, a lieutenant colonel’s command of something under 1,000 men. Atkins’s life in the line and out of it, his chances of promotion and leave, the tautness of the discipline that bound him, his day-to-day relationships on and off duty, and even the way he wore his uniform, all reflected his unit’s culture. But battalions themselves, however huge they seemed to the men in them, were small parts of a huge and complex machine. They were combined into formations – in ascending order: brigades, divisions, corps and armies. These were commanded by generals, assisted by staff officers, collectively known, from their distinguishing collar-patches, as ‘red tabs’.

  Formation headquarters – just four officers and twenty-three other ranks for an infantry brigade in 1914 to the 3,000 souls that constituted general headquarters by the war’s end – needed offices, living accommodation and stabling. In the early months of the war large schools provided good temporary headquarters (though there were complaints about the size of desks), but soon big houses of one sort or another accommodated entire brigade or divisional headquarters, or parts of corps or army headquarters. These residences were often called châteaux, though the word covers a multitude of buildings from stately homes, through large country houses and modest farmhouses, to suburban residences with lofty titles but poky rooms. Although the First World War initiated the expression ‘château generalship’, commanders of previous centuries had usually lived in just such buildings, and even in 1944–45 Allied generals in France and Belgium were often housed in châteaux for perfectly good reasons. However, Field Marshal Montgomery, anxious not to attract the damaging publicity aroused by tales of comfortable life in well-appointed houses in an earlier war, initially lived in a caravan in the garden of a Normandy château, though eventually the autumn weather drove even the ascetic Monty inside.

  The generals of the war remain one of the most controversial groups in the whole of British history, and some memoirs and diaries certainly seethe with criticism of them. Gerald Burgoyne, a regular officer in the Royal Irish Rifles, wrote from Belgium in early 1915 that:

  the whole time I have been out here I never once saw any of our Brigade or Divisional Staff come up to the trenches, and the ground around is to all the staff a kind of terra incognita. I have heard so many troops in other divisions say the same thing. In the five months I was in the trenches, I only once saw one of our Brigade Staff visit us, and not once did any of the Divisional Staff come near us. After a time we dreaded the idea of making attacks knowing it would mean heavy casualties and failure.1

  He later reported of an incident where one British battalion fired on another that it was:

  Rotten staff management and all caused by the staff never coming near the trenches … The consequence was that the staff were never in touch with the regimental officer – never in sympathy with him and appeared rather to look down on him for being shabby in apperance and at times very dirty. And nothing irritates the Regimental Officer more than the sight of Red Tabs, which have become the insignia of hopeless inefficiency.

  Luckily there are exceptions to this, as to every other rule; but, unfortunately, this is the general opinion of the British army at present.2

  Lieutenant Lancelot Spicer told his mother that Loos was ‘rather chaotic. In fact the chief thing to be gathered is that our men fought pretty well (64th Infantry Brigade, 21st Division) … but that the Divisional and Brigade Staffs were absolute washouts.’3 In March 1915 Lord Stanhope, commanding a company of Grenadier Guards – but shortly to become a brass hat himself – declared that: ‘These Brass Hats (as the regimental officer calls the staff) know very little about the other end.’4

  Postwar assessments grew increasingly vitriolic. Brigadier General Frank Crozier, in an account written in 1937 when resentment was at its height, his funds were low, and the generals he criticised by name were dead, declared that senior officers were:

  all branded with the same mark — incompetence and self-satisfaction. Haig, in his later days, thought that the mantle of the almighty had fallen on him in order that he might win the war of God against the barbarians … Horne could seldom do anything save touch his hat! Rawlinson was a circus clown! Robertson was a good troop sergeant-major …5

  And Eric Hiscock, writing in the 1970s, gives us what has become enshrined as the private soldier’s view of it all.

  Haig (how we hated him and all his lot) had certain disastrous failings. An optimist of optimists he refused to acknowledge failure. In a daft way he was an inspired man, with the dire conviction he was never wrong. ‘The well-loved horse,’ he said, years after the cataclysm of the Kaiser’s war, ‘will always be important in war.’ … Stupid sod, he should have been up to his navel in mud and water, with nothing but chlorinated tea to drink and dog biscuits and bully beef to eat, and have to piss in the place where he slept. He might then have noticed that the men under his sad command had dropped shoulders, bulging eyes, unshaven faces, and that they staggered more often than they stepped, on their way to the jaws of death.6

  But it is equally true that what officers and men wrote during the war was far less critical that the views attributed to them subsequently. Gestures that seemed theatrical fifty yea
rs on were appreciated at the time. Private Frank Hawkings recalled that on 22 April 1915 his exhausted battalion began to recover from Second Ypres.

  We halted in a field near the road … and after relieving ourselves of our packs and equipment, stretched our weary limbs and lay back on the dusty grass, some to snatch a little sleep and others to smoke and chat.

  At noon General Smith-Dorrien suddenly appeared on the scene. The battalion hastily rose to its many feet and shook itself into ordered ranks. The general then congratulated us on our achievements on Hill 60.7

  Lieutenant F. P. Roe always retained an affectionate memory of Rawlinson issuing orders: ‘He was the very epitome of a distinguished soldier.8 Ernest Parker, a platoon commander in a Royal Fusiliers battalion inspected by Haig, thought that his ‘kindly eyes looked into my own as he passed along the ranks …’.9 Bernard Martin, a survivor of the Somme, no longer had any illusions about official plans or reports, but was delighted to salute Haig as his battalion came out of the line.

  We were an exhausted remnant, torn uniforms, rifles slung over our shoulders anyhow, boots uncleaned for weeks, puttees slack, but remarkably content to be alive.

  ‘Thirteen Platoon … eyes right.’ I made my personal salute as smart as I could. But it was a poor show really, too thin, not enough of us – in my platoon only me and four men. All the same I felt I was acting in a bit of a drama. I had saluted the C in C … and was proud to have done so as I think my four men were proud … For me the honour of saluting the C in C was the finale of a large experience.10