There is certainly no easy congruence between reputation and achievement, and the frequently-derided 19th and 34th Divisions were actually quite good. And although 51st Highland stood high in the army’s regard by 1918, it took some time to scale the pinnacle of glory. Walter Nicholson, one of its regular staff officers, thought that sending the division’s units to France piecemeal in 1915 was ‘the negation of good organisation’ from which it took months to recover. It was commanded in 1915–17 by Major General George ‘Uncle’ Harper, and its HD divisional patch was the subject of unkind jests. When the division took Beaumont Hamel in November 1916, at the very end of the Somme, Harper was well forward, chatting to walking wounded as they made their way back. He made the mistake of asking one Highlander how the battle was going. ‘Well, anyhow,’ said the man, ‘they canna’ ca’ us Harper’s Duds ony mair.’33
Robert Graves, helping train new drafts at the Harfleur ‘bullring’ in early 1916, discussed divisional ranking with his fellow instructors. ‘It seemed to be agreed,’ he wrote,
that about a third of the troops forming the British Expeditionary Force were dependable on all occasions: those were always called on for important tasks. About a third were variable: divisions that contained one or two weak battalions but could usually be trusted. The remainder were more or less untrustworthy: being put in places of comparative safety, they lost about a quarter of the men that the best troops did. It was a matter of pride to belong to one of the recognised top-notch divisions – the Second, Seventh, Twenty-Ninth, Guards’, First Canadian, for instance. These were not pampered when in reserve, as the German storm-troops were; but promotion, leave, and the chance of a wound came quicker in them.34
Above the division, the next link in the chain of command was the corps, formally (though rarely in practice) termed the army corps, and with its number correctly written in roman numerals. The corps was a level of command with which the British army was almost wholly unfamiliar, and given its ‘small-war’ tradition and aptitude this is not surprising. Although Wellington’s army had been divided into three corps for the Waterloo campaign of 1815, the duke allowed his corps commanders little initiative. The British did not interpose corps headquarters between general headquarters and the fighting divisions in either the Crimean or the Boer Wars, its largest campaigns in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although autumn manoeuvres in 1912 and 1913 embodied extemporised corps, Sir James Edmonds maintained that:
it was not originally intended to have any intermediate echelon between the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force and the six divisions. The decision to form corps was – in order to conform to French organisation – made immediately on the formal appointment on mobilisation of Field-Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief. Thus it happened that two out of the three corps staffs had to be improvised; and even in the divisional staffs the Peace Establishment allowed for only two out of the six officers given in War Establishment.35
By the war’s end there were twenty-four British, one ANZAC (its initials, now so emotive, standing for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and one Canadian Corps. However, not all British corps served on the Western Front; in November 1918, for instance, there were then eighteen corps and the cavalry corps in France and Belgium.
The corps was initially little more than a very small headquarters (just eighteen officers) under a lieutenant general, that controlled the divisions under its command. As the war went on, however, corps headquarters grew steadily bigger, to twenty-three officers in mid-1916 and thirty-seven by November 1918. This did not simply reflect a tendency for headquarters at all levels to increase in size, partly to reflect the need, not identified by pre-war planners, to run headquarters on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it also marked the fact that corps steadily gained more muscle as the war went on, and saw it become an important battle-fighting formation in its own right, with an added weight of combat power that made it more than simply the sum of its divisions.
By the end of the war the corps had its own heavy artillery, quite apart from that allocated to divisions, as well as a heavy trench-mortar battery and a wide range of transport columns and workshops. Its senior artillery officers, now with separate headquarters for corps artillery and corps heavy artillery, were no longer artillery advisers but artillery commanders, able to make full use of the range and flexibility of what was increasingly regarded as the battle-winning weapon: the gun. The growth in status of the senior gunner at corps headquarters was gradual. In 1914 he was the brigadier general Royal Artillery (BGRA), simply an adviser, but by 1917 had become the artillery commander, general officer commanding Royal Artillery (GOC RA) with full authority over his corps artillery and its fire planning. Structural and personal problems remained, however. Perhaps the most notorious came in VI Corps in late 1916 when the Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett arrived to take up the new post of corps counter-battery colonel. He immediately declared that he was not in the least interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash-spotting and sound ranging. His corps counter-battery intelligence officer was invited to ‘go away and stay away’. The only counter-battery shots which he would allow, he declared, were those against targets clearly visible from British lines, or those he had personally detected on his ouija board.36 One brother officer described him as ‘probably the nastiest man I have ever met in this world’, and there must have been wry smiles when he disappeared on an expedition to the Mato Grosso in 1925.
Unlike the division and the brigade, the British corps had no permanent establishment. For instance, in November 1918 there was one corps headquarters with no divisions at all, waiting in reserve; three corps with two divisions; four corps with three divisions; eight corps with four divisions, and two corps with five divisions, in addition to the three-division Cavalry Corps. Divisions shifted between corps on an irregular and apparently unplanned basis: an extreme example of the practice was the move of 51st Highland Division between three corps in a single week in 1918. The Canadian Corps and ANZAC, however, retained their corps integrity throughout, which is one reason for the consistently high achievement of their divisions. It is hard to overstate the damaging effect of shuffling divisions between corps for, just as divisional standard operating procedures were all different, so too were those of corps, and divisional staffs had to master new procedures every time their divisions moved, with the shock wave of changes in reports and returns reverberating all the way down to companies in the line.
‘Reports and returns’: how little this expression would have meant to anyone who had not been compelled to wring them out of tired men spread about company’s trench frontage. In May 1915 Captain Rowland Feilding, then commanding a Coldstream company in the line, sent his wife a humorous example of how they fitted into a day of trench life. The messages would have been in the argot known as ‘signalese’, signaller’s English, taken down by the company’s duty telephone operator and written in indelible pencil on a message pad (Army Form C.2121), with aaa standing for a full stop.
5 pm Arrival in trenches. Temper normal. Half an hour spent trying to appear interested while the outgoing officer explains the enormous amount of work he has done in his time there.
5.30 pm Outgoing officer departs. Half an hour spent commenting with your own officers on the utter and complete absence of any sign of any work whatever having been done since you were there last.
6 pm Start your own work for the night.
6.15 pm Telephone operator reports that he has got connection with Battalion Headquarters (NB: Life in the Trenches has now started.)
6.45 pm First instalment of messages handed in to you.
No.1. ‘You will hold respirator and smoke helmet drills frequently during your tour aaa The signal for respirators to be put on will be two C’s on the bugle. Adjutant.’
No. 2. ‘Report at once if you have a fully qualified Welsh miner in your company who can speak French and German aaa Age not under
18 years. Adjutant.’
No. 3. ‘All respirators will be immediately withdrawn aaa The signal for putting them on will be two blasts of the whistle and not as per the last part on my message No. 1 of this date. Adjutant.’
No. 4. ‘A French aeroplane with slightly curved wings, giving it the appearance of a German one, is known to be in your vicinity aaa Use your discretion in accordance with Anti-Aircraft Regulations para 1; section 5. Adjutant.’
No. 5. ‘Re my message No. 4, for the word “French” read “German” and for the word “German” read “French” aaa You will still use your discretion. Adjutant.’
7.30 pm Messages dealt with. Dinner.
8.30 pm Arrival of C.O. Suggests politely that your men would be better employed doing some other kind of work. All working parties turned over to different work. Temper indifferent.
9 pm to 2 am Answer telephone messages.
2.30 am Stand to arms. Walk round and survey the result of the night’s work. Find the greater part of it has been blown in by trench mortars in the early morning.
3.30 am Try and sleep. 4 am Wakened up to receive the following messages:
No. 115. ‘All smoke helmets are to be immediately marked with the date of issue aaa If no date is known no date should be marked and the matter reported accordingly. Adjutant.’
No. 116. ‘RE require a working party from your company today from 6 am to 7 pm aaa Strength 150 with suitable proportion of NCOs aaa Otherwise, your work is to be continued as usual. Adjutant.’
5 am Wakened up to send in ‘Situation Report’. Report situation ‘Normal.’
8 am Breakfast.
9 to 11 am Scraping off mud in Oxford Street. Removing bits of bacon in Bond Street. Re-burying a Fritz who, owing to a night’s rain, has suddenly appeared in Regent Street.
11.15 am Arrival of Brigadier-General and Staff. Orders given for everything that has been dug out to be filled in and everything that has been filled in to be dug out.
11.16 am Departure of Brigade Staff. Brain now in state of coma. Feel nothing except a dull wonder. Rest of day spent eating chocolates, writing letters home to children and picking flowers off the bank. Final message can remember receiving was about twelve noon:
No. 121. ‘The Brigadier-General and Staff will shortly be round your trenches. Adjutant.’37
Walter Nicholson, who served on divisional and corps staffs and at GHQ, argued that until the very end of the war there was no generally understood definition of the difference between ‘Trench Strength Returns’, ‘Daily Fighting Strength Returns’, and ‘Ration Strength Returns’. The precise information required in situation reports varied from formation to formation, making the adjutant, the battalion commander’s principal staff officer, the meat in a bureaucratic sandwich. General headquarters certainly did its unyielding best to say what it wanted, and, unlike the Feilding account above, the following was not written in jest.
Effective strength of unit should show (1) the total strength of officers of the unit, including all sick in the country, and (2) of all men, excluding only sick in L of C hospitals and wounded in hospital and missing, but including any men detailed from their unit for any purpose, a detailed note being made in the ‘Remarks’ column showing the units to which detached officers and men are attached.
Details by arms attached as in War Establishments should show these officers and men of other arms of the Service whose attachment is provided for in War Establishments, and who are shown in the War Establishment tables in the ‘Total (including attached).’
Attached (not to include details shown above) should show all other officers and men of other units who are attached to the unit for any purpose, a detailed note being made in the ‘Remarks’ column showing the unit from which officers and men are detached …38
We can deduce from this that an ‘Effective Strength Return’, since it includes sick and wounded, is not the same either as a ‘Fighting Strength Return’ which excludes these men, or a ‘Trench Strength Return’ which excludes the quartermaster and transport officer and their myrmidons, the varying percentage of men deliberately left out of the line as a nucleus for reconstitution, as well as assorted ‘base details’. However, a hard-pressed adjutant, working in the stale air of a dugout under shellfire, his Army Form B.213 barely visible in the guttering flame of the oil lamp, might appreciate the differences less easily. And there were many refinements. For instance, Army Service Corps units were sternly enjoined that in any rolls or returns concerning personnel ‘care should be taken to insert with the regimental number the index letter which, in all cases, precedes the number: The letters are:- S., T., M., S.S., TS., A.S.R., A.S.E., S.R.M.T., S.E., C.M.T., M.S., C.H.T., and B.B.’39 An infantry company in the line might be expected to produce five separate returns in a twenty-four-hour period, all requiring different information subject to a definition which was not only precise but liable to variation according to the whim of brigade, division and corps.
Nicholson went further, suggesting that there was a real break between division and corps. ‘The battles fought with a division were personal affairs,’ he believed.
The fighting, whether success or failure, meant heavy losses in friends. When serving in a corps staff the interest shifted from this personal aspect to the mutual, to what objective we had succeeded in gaining, and the consequent effect of these objectives on roads, dumps and railways.40
He argued that this brought a sense of detachment which was hard to overcome. ‘We might have expected some measure of good repute,’ he wrote of his time on a corps staff,
but they [the divisions] hated us. We were all business and no soul; just a damned nuisance to everyone … We knew none of the divisional staffs and they knew none of us; a disastrous state of affairs. There was no human touch between the corps and the division – and there never could have been until they realised its need.41
Corps were under the command of armies. The original BEF effectively constituted a single army with two corps, but as more troops arrived a new level of command was introduced, with 1st and 2nd Armies coming into being on 25 December 1914. Third Army followed in July 1915, as the BEF extended its line south, and 4th Army in January 1916 as planning for the Somme began. Exploitation of the hoped-for breakthrough on the Somme was to be entrusted to the reserve army, but this was committed to command the fighting north of the Albert-Bapaume road in the first week of the battle, although it was not formally renamed 5th Army till the autumn, by which time, coincidentally, any chance of it exercising the function originally envisaged by Haig had long since disappeared.
Fourth Army was radically scaled down in May 1917, much to the irritation of its commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who had been hoping to be entrusted with the main attack at Ypres that summer. ‘This is rather a blow for I had been looking forward to that northern attack even though it is a difficult one,’ he admitted in his diary. ‘D.H. said nothing about it to me direct nor did [Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot] Kiggell [Haig’s chief of staff] so I only heard of it by accident in discussing matters with Tavish [Davidson, head of the General Staff’s Operations Section] afterwards.’42 In March 1918 Rawlinson was sent south to take over 5th Army, then reeling under the impact of the German offensive. Fifth Army effectively disappeared for a time, but was soon reconstituted and by the war’s end there were again five British armies in France, each with three or four corps.
Like corps, armies had no fixed establishment: in the summer of 1917, 4th Army had so few troops to command that Rawlinson found it hard to occupy himself, and though he managed ‘to do a bit of reading’ he admitted that: ‘I find it rather hard to get through the day and generally have to organise an expedition somewhere to kill time.’43 At the same time 5th Army, attacking at Ypres, had four full corps in the line, another weak corps in reserve and a corps in GHQ reserve poised behind that, with over 2,000 guns, 216 tanks and 406 aircraft. Just as corps expanded from being little more than post-boxes for the divisions they com
manded, so armies grew from a collection of corps to structures with powerful artillery assets of their own which they could shift about the front so as support the main efforts of their corps. Of particular importance was the establishment of a major general Royal Artillery (MGRA) at army headquarters. However, because the general staff insisted that artillery officers could only issue orders to units directly under their command, MGRAs never enjoyed the authority over the gunners in their army that corps artillery commanders did for those in their own corps. Major General Budworth, MGRA of 4th Army, had the chagrin of seeing his plan for 1 July 1916 followed by only one of the four attacking corps: XIII Corps followed his advice ‘almost to the letter and with success’.44
Finally, general headquarters controlled the entire British military effort in France. In accordance with the practice of the period, still identifiable in a modern British headquarters, it consisted of three branches, under the control of the chief of the general staff.45 This post was held at the outset of the war by the pleasant but somewhat ineffectual Major General Archibald Murray, who had made a bad recovery from a stomach wound received in South Africa. Lieutenant Edward Spears, then a liaison officer between GHQ and the French 5th Army, reported to him in the Hôtel Lion d’Or at Rheims in the scorching heat of August 1914. Murray:
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