Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  Some found the business of discharge a brief punctuation in the longed-for transformation from soldier to civilian. Alfred Hale, demobilised at Fovant camp, ‘a mass of corrugated iron and wooden huts’ just west of Salisbury, could never again look at the branch line that took him home on the South-West Railway to Wimbledon ‘without recollecting what it meant to me that afternoon’.28 Ginger Byrne, on leave in London, fed up with the army, and well aware that ‘firing machine guns and looking after them’ had limited attraction to civilian employers, procured a slip from a friend of his sister’s promising a job (which, like many such, never materialised). He was sent to the Machine Gun Corps pay office in Chelsea, and thence to the demobilisation centre at Crystal Place.

  I went in to the Crystal Palace a soldier with my rifle and equipment and everything on, and I came out the other a civvy – civvy clothes, civvy suit. And I drew thirty-five quid blood money – that’s my gratuity, see. Out of the army and out of a job.29

  It took Frank Dunham, another slip man, three visits to the London Records Office, but eventually his unit wired ‘Release Approved’ and off he went to ‘Purfleet Demobilisation Camp, where I handed in all my kit and left for home’.30

  George Coppard was convalescing at Alnwick, where he received his Military Medal from General Sir John Maxwell of Northern Command (‘an exciting experience’) when the war ended. ‘I have always regretted that I was not in at the finish of the fighting,’ he wrote. ‘To have celebrated survival with those left of my old company would have been a privilege indeed.’ He was demobilised just after his twenty-first birthday, with four and a half years’ service, picking up a £28 gratuity and handing in his greatcoat for the £1. And then:

  I joined the queue for jobs as messengers, window cleaners and scullions. It was a complete let down for thousands of men like me, and for some young officers too. It was a common sight in London to see ex-officers with barrel organs, refusing to earn a living as beggars. Single men picked up twenty-one shillings a week unemployment pay as a special allowance, but there were no jobs for the ‘heroes’ who had won the war.31

  Like so many other ex-soldiers he was bitter at the lavish grants for Field Marshal Haig and Admiral Beatty (£100,000 plus earldoms) and the £30,000 and viscountcies for the army commanders. It was the last act in the unlucky tactlessness which had so tainted the relationship between the red tabs and the rest.

  For others, that swing of the hinge, as one life opened into another, grated painfully. ‘My demobilisation papers came through in March [1919],’ wrote William Carr. ‘When it was time to go, I slipped quietly away unable to face the gunners, for the memories of all that had happened had come surging back in a great wave of emotion. The tears were streaming down my face.’32 ‘Looking back on those firm ranks as they marched into billets, to the Fusiliers’ march,’ wrote Guy Chapman, ‘I found that this body of men had become so much part of me that its disintegration would tear away something I cared for more dearly than I could have believed. I was it, and it was I …’.33 Charles Douie thought that battalions should have been demobilised decently as formed bodies, not whittled away. He remembered his own last parade, in the pre-dawn chill.

  I gave for the last time the familiar orders; the men disappeared into the cold and darkness. I returned to the mess-room and sat by the fire. I had several hours to wait but I had no desire to sleep again. In my last hours as a soldier I wanted to think, and in the firelight the memorable years marched by.34

  Young officers, so many of them ‘temporary gentlemen’ with wartime commissions, became increasingly aware of the impermanence of their status. Guy Chapman recalled how:

  We were melting fast. In two months we should be down to cadre strength. We should be dispersed into an unfriendly world, Smith back at business, Whitehead sailing for Port Elizabeth, Gwinnell going east, Uncle in Chelsea. A commission for the employment of ex-service officers and men under the leadership of Sir Henry Lucy appeared at divisional headquarters … An elderly bilious person attended to my questions after he had explained pathetically that this was the first holiday he had taken for years. ‘How old are you?’ he asked. ‘Twenty eight.’ ‘Oh you’re far too old. I’m sorry. I can do nothing. Good morning.’ Disconsolately I joined Smith and Blake outside. ‘My old sod,’ said Blake harshly, ‘told me that military distinction was quite a useless distinction for civil life. Then I told him that I’d get a better job in London than he was ever likely to get; but that if he was going to hand out this kind of stuff to my subalterns, the sooner he cut his holiday short the better.’35

  But J. B. Priestley, another temporary gentleman, was glad to get out without a backward glance.

  No awards for gallantry had come – or were to come – my way; but I was entitled to certain medals and ribbons. I never applied for them; I was never sent them; I have never had them. Feeling that the giant locusts that had eaten my four and a half years could have them, glad to remember that never again would anybody tell me to carry on, I shrugged the shoulders of a civvy coat that was a bad fit, and carried on.36

  It was soon told how ‘ex-officer organ-grinders, cabmen and railway porters became familiar objects of compassion’. In 1920 a journal lamented:

  Ex-officers who … are turning their hands to many things. Brigadier-Generals are acting as company cooks to the R.I.C. [Royal Irish Constabulary]. Colonels are hawking vegetables. Majors are travelling in proprietary goods. Captains are renovating derelict ‘prams’. And subalterns are seeking anything which will keep them from having to fall back on charity or to beg in the streets.37

  Alfred Pollard, a London insurance clerk who enlisted in 1914 and was commissioned two years later, won the VC, DCM, MC and bar. He was at one time reduced to trying to pawn his medals, but recouped his fortunes with the 1932 book Fire Eater in which he described how much he had relished combat. Harry Carter, signals sergeant in 2/South Staffordshire in 1914, ended the war commanding 7/South Staffordshire and earned a DSO and bar and an MC and bar. He invested his £1,500 gratuity in a poultry farm which failed, and then worked as a mechanic in a motorcycle factory and as a steel erector.

  Many temporary officers commissioned from the ranks returned to their old trade and re-enlisted into the ranks. One spectacular case was Lieutenant F. G. S. Thomas, compulsorily retired in 1924 under the ‘Geddes axe’ of army reductions. He immediately enlisted as a gunner in No. 8 Mountain Battery on the North-West Frontier of India, and was an imposing figure as his battery’s right marker on parade, with his impressive physique and MC. He was re-commissioned in 1932, and badly wounded in 1941, winning a DSO, as a battery commander in the Western Desert. Lastly, the demobilised officer became as much of a cliché in the novels of the postwar years as the half-pay officer had been in books written after the Napoleonic wars. The best-known example is Oliver Mellors, Lady Chatterley’s Lover indeed, an infantry officer turned gamekeeper.

  Dissatisfaction with the new life reflected more than difficulty in finding jobs. ‘The trouble was that so many civilian jobs seemed by comparison with fighting for one’s country, unromantic, petty, even undignified,’ mused H. E. L. Mellersh.

  No doubt many of us had ideas above our station: we had been somebody during the war and we expected to continue to be somebody. Perhaps it was a good thing that I had not got that MC or that temporary captaincy, for I might have felt more like that myself. Perhaps also we contributed to the disillusionment ourselves by conforming unconsciously, that is to say, to the tradition of peacetime employment, the tradition of having an unheroic cash nexus … one did not strike in the army, for pay or anything else. It had probably never occurred to me that I was employed, and for pay … There was a nobility in being a soldier.38

  Some went even further. Graham Greenwell wrote that:

  The horrors of the Great War and the miseries of those who were called upon to take part have been described by innumerable writers. For my own part I have to confess that I look back on the years 1914–1918 as am
ong the happiest I have ever spent. That they contained moments of boredom and depression, or sorrow for the loss of friends and of alarm for my personal safety, is indeed true enough. But to be perfectly fit, to live among pleasant companions, to have responsibility and a clearly defined job – these are great compensations when one is very young.39

  Adrian Carton de Wiart, much-decorated and repeatedly wounded, agreed:

  Frankly I had enjoyed the war; it had given me many bad moments, lots of good ones, plenty of excitement, and with everything found for us. Now I had ample time for retrospection … Far and away the most interesting and important lesson I had learned was on man. War is a great leveller; it shows the man as he really is, not as he would like to be, nor as he would like you to think he is. It shows him stripped, with his greatness mixed with pathetic fears and weaknesses, and though there were disappointments they were more than cancelled out by pleasant surprises of the little men who, suddenly, became larger than life.40

  John Reith professed himself ‘happy and absolutely thrilled with it’, but his views might have changed had he remained in the infantry for the whole war. F. P. Roe had ‘enjoyed the tremendous traditions and sense of comradeship which the army accorded’ to the extent that he became a regular, served throughout the Second World War, and only in 1952 did he hang up his Sam Browne for the last time: ‘It was the same unchanged belt that I had worn for nearly thirty-eight years.’41 And Charles Carrington echoed so many veterans in declaring: ‘We were bonded together by a unity of experience that had shaken off every kind of illusion, and which was utterly unpretentious. The battalion was my home and my job, the only career I knew.’42 It had of course been easier for officers to enjoy the war than it had been for ordinary soldiers: if they had more chance of being killed, they lived better out of the line. But one of Huntley Gordon’s sergeants believed that most men were genuinely cheerful:

  the squalid side of the war doesn’t matter to them at all, so long as they have their own friends with them and are fairly treated by their officers and NCOs. What does make them wild is to get about 2/6d a day and hear of Clydeside dockers and South Wales miners, who get at least five times as much, striking … to demand still higher pay.43

  Horses, such a pride and comfort to so many men during the war, were also discharged. They were examined by vets and only the best were returned to Britain: the rest were sold locally, often for knock-down prices on a flooded market. This caused intense grief in the Middle East, where animals were harshly treated indeed. The troopers of an Australian Light Horse brigade held a race meeting one day and shot their horses the next. One summed up his feelings:

  Maybe I’ll be court-martialled,

  but I’m damned if I’m inclined

  To go back to Australia

  and leave my horse behind.

  Even in France and Belgium there was widespread resentment at another example of governmental parsimony. ‘We stopped in the market square,’ wrote Guy Chapman.

  It was the day of condemnation for our horses. They were to be examined by the ADVS [Assistant Director of Veterinary Services], and those which he cast were to be sold to the Belgians. Knowing the manner in which the natives treat their animals, we were as angry at this as at every other scheme which a vile administration was putting into practice. Hallam met me with a gap toothed grin more distended than ever. ‘It’s all right, sir. She’s going home. Aren’t you my beauty.’ Ginger took her congratulations coldly. She was quite aware of her value. Home too was the sentence for Polly and the quarter-master’s Bob. Something had been saved.44

  Officers were allowed to buy their chargers if they passed the inspection. Captain Lloyd Evans of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers:

  Negotiated for Jenny, the adjutant’s hack; but my sentimental gesture fell through as she was graded ‘for sale on the Continent’. Yates [the quartermaster] got Girlie … She was ridden with the Wynnstay Hounds, and reared a foal which was ridden with the Wynnstay; she lived until 1931.45

  Some horses bore charmed lives. Cauliflower, a 15-hand bay mare with black points, carried Sergeant Major Lorimer of the Northumberland Hussars during the war. She returned home to take a Miss Straker hunting for fifty-three days in 1922–23 without once being ‘sick or sorry’. Jones and Joubert, gun horses of J Battery RHA, out since Mons, went home in 1918 and, turned out in the stable yard of their Aldershot barracks, walked unhesitatingly to their old stalls. They had more of pre-war life to return to than many of the war’s human survivors.

  In strict terms the war created no ‘Lost Generation’. Britain did not lose ‘an entire generation of young poets, philosophers and politicians in the war’, and the influenza epidemic of 1918–19 was far more destructive. But the actual death rate – one in four of men who served were under twenty-five years old in 1914 – is severe in itself, all the more so for selecting a high proportion of the bravest and the best. And, as J. M. Winter has demonstrated, the war killed a greater proportion of officers than other ranks, and ‘privileged groups bore a disproportionately heavy burden of war losses …’46 The war did not wipe out the aristocracy, though as C. F. G. Masterman observed shortly after the war, the aristocracy had not suffered such losses since the Wars of the Roses. David Cannadine echoed this, affirming that not since this time ‘had so many patricians died so suddenly and violently’.47 They made this sacrifice ‘in the defence of a country that was gradually but irreversibly ceasing to be theirs’. The reduction in agricultural rents and the splitting up of great estates had begun well before the war: the movement was to accelerate into the 1920s and 1930s, and the loss of young aristocrats played its part in the process.

  Gerald Gliddon’s county survey shows how the war blighted the great houses of the land. Lord Anslow of Bangors Park in Buckinghamshire lost his son and heir in 1915; the Desboroughs of Taplow Court in Buckinghamshire lost two of their sons, Julian and Billy, in the war and a third, Ivo, was mortally injured in a car crash in 1926, and Lord Cawley of Berrington Park in Herefordshire lost three of his four boys. So it goes on, county by county and house by house.48 A beautiful memorial chapel in St Barnabas Church, Ranmore, near Dorking, distracted my attention during a recent family wedding. It commemorates three of the four sons of Henry, 2nd Baron Ashcombe and his wife Maud. Henry was killed when the Guards Division attacked on the Somme on 15 September 1916, and Alick died with the 15th Hussars at Bourlon Wood in November 1917. William was killed charging with the Royal Dragoons near Ham on 24 March 1918 in what the Marquess of Anglesey calls one of the best examples of shock action of the whole war: up to 100 Germans were cut down and another 100 captured.

  But the parish memorial plaque in the same church emphasises just how widely the burden was shared. This tiny parish lost fourteen of its men in the war, a toll multiplied, stone by stone by stone, on war memorials across the land. For in remembering the blood debt paid by the aristocracy, so well commemorated in bronze and ashlar, we should not forget how the process of volunteering early on in the war had also swept up the natural leaders of other social groups. I think particularly of militant miners, who volunteered in such numbers and died in a proportion that brings them their own hard nobility. As G. W. E. Russell wrote at the time: ‘The burden of the war lies as heavy on the poor as on the rich, for neither poverty nor riches can mend a broken heart.’49

  Amongst the 3,450 dead in the Australian Imperial Force Burial Ground, a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Grass Lane, Flers, lie Lieutenant Colonel Charles, Earl of Feversham, Second Lieutenant Ernest Shephard and Sergeant Harold Jackson VC. Feversham left his broad acres, a pretty countess and happy children to die leading the battalion he had raised, 21/King’s Royal Rifle Corps (the Yeoman Rifles to its many friends) in its first battle. Dogs were frequent visitors to the trenches and he had taken his deerhound to war: it too was killed, and was buried with him.50 Shephard, a photographer’s son from Lyme Regis, left home young and first went to sea before joing the Dorsets in 1909 at the age of seventeen
. Lance corporal the next year, he was a corporal in 1913 and went to war as a sergeant, rising to company sergeant major in April 1914. He was commissioned in November 1916 and killed commanding a company of 5/Dorsets less than two months later. Professional to the last, when he saw that his position was untenable he sent a message warning a supporting company that it should not waste men and reinforce him. He lies seven miles from his ‘dearest chum’, CSM Sam Shapton, who went off for his last tour in the trenches in November 1915 despite being very ill. The RMO had told him that he could stay with the transport, and Shephard begged him to do so. ‘No,’ he told Shephard, ‘I’m no quitter. I’ll go with my boys.’51 He was shot through the head. Harold Jackson was a wartime volunteer from Kirton, near Boston in Lincolnshire, who had won his VC in March 1918 but been killed on the old Somme battlefield in August 1918, underlining yet again the human cost of the last Hundred Days.

  The ‘lost generation’ cannot simply be charted by those who were killed or crippled, although the latter definition must certainly be widened to include men who returned broken in mind rather than body: in March 1939, 120,000 men were still receiving pensions or had received awards from primary psychiatric disability. And there were many who were not disabled but whose bodies never healed: I. G. Andrew’s company commander, hit at Loos, had to have his wound dressed daily for the rest of his long life. There were thousands, across the whole social spectrum, who came home unable to take much interest in things that might have excited them before the war. A.J.P. Taylor suggested that the real ‘lost generation’ were the men who might, but for the war, have gone into politics, and whose absence from the political stage contributed to a lack of leadership which was to cast its own dark shadow into the 1930s.