5327

by Mark Rowe

  I was proud to think that I was a fully trained Saturday afternoon soldier in the Horse Transport section of a divisional field ambulance, as I had trained assiduously and attended three annual two week camps.

  Batty, and four Salford friends, had joined the Territorials from the same church and cricket club. Whereas at work and in their leisure such young men were junior to their elders, with little to look forward to except becoming elders themselves, Batty’s memoir (based on his diary of the time) shows how he relished what the Territorials gave him, even before a war: responsibility for a wagon and horses, a small but guaranteed part in something big, and hard work for your country. ‘Never had a more excited time’, he wrote on August 8, though later in the month he admitted it was ‘graft on no food and no sleep’. Batty reported for duty at 9am on August 5 - the depot had turned him away, the evening before - and was soon a victim of stupid army discipline. He went home to sleep on August 6 because there was nowhere to lie down, and next day was told he was under arrest. It meant little, however, while the unit was busy taking in civilian horses and equipment of all shapes and sizes, the only available: “mineral water carts with a high dicky seat, parcel vans which served as ambulances and large butts on wheels with which the corporation watered the streets to keep the dust down”, Batty recalled. Three weeks later, as the British retreated from Belgium, the German captain and novelist Walter Bloem misunderstood the abandoned commercial vehicles he passed, ‘from apparently every big town in England ... England obviously regarded this war as a business undertaking’. It did not occur to Bloem that the British army had scraped together any transport it could.

  Bloem saw motors with burst tyres or broken axles; horse-drawn transport brought its own troubles. On August 19, as Batty’s unit took to the road, his horses took fright, until he pulled them up only feet short of a ditch. Understandably, noise from well-wishers made animals bolt. In Bristol on August 10, two Territorial battalions of the Gloucestershire regiment left their drill hall and marched, separately, down to the city centre. Two horses pulling a wagon of baggage, leaving first, became restive and galloped out of control; down steep Park Street they swerved and hit a wagonette standing outside Newcombe’s, a carver and gilder at number 73. The wagonette turned over and crushed an old lady inside a parked horse and trap. She died later. One of the two horses, with a broken leg, was shot where it lay; all this watched by the crowd, until a cart took the carcass away.

  The Glosters got on trains in the city. The picture we might like to have in our mind’s eye of the departing troops - a band leading them, hundreds cheering in the market place - is true enough. What we don’t imagine so readily is what happened after the last townsman accompanying them out of town turned back, and a turn in the road or a watershed hid their last view of home, and the marchers were left with themselves: the sun in their face or on their neck, the clump of boots, and the 70lbs of kit on their back. As two days’ rations they might have had a 2lb loaf. Some units had further to walk than others, but terrain and weather made a march feel longer, not only the number of miles. Ashbourne’s 50 Territorials set off on the Buxton road on Wednesday August 5, crossed the Derbyshire dales to Matlock by evening, and arrived at Chesterfield the next day, a good 20 miles in all. The 5th North Staffs took two days to march the 30 or so miles from the Potteries to Burton-on-Trent, in mid-August, resting overnight at Uttoxeter; at times the weather was ‘almost tropical’, according to the Uttoxeter paper. Newark Territorials had a similar journey, to Derby, stopping halfway at Radcliffe-on-Trent.

  For whatever reason - the still familiar surroundings, their relative freshness, the euphoria of the extraordinary, the goodwill of householders offering tea from the roadside, and perhaps more - some men had yet to knuckle down. Aubrey Moore was a young lieutenant (he would celebrate his 21st birthday on August 30 with a bottle of champagne in a Luton hotel) of the Hinckley company of the Leicestershire Territorials. He recalled in old age how he arrived in Hinckley on Wednesday morning, August 5, to find it had gone ‘mad’: “By midday the pubs were running short and men were crowding into the drill hall to sign on for enlistment with us, being quite prepared to take on the whole German army single handed.” Moore was one of the few memoir writers of August 1914 to admit the part played by beer. His men had about 20 miles to walk, to Loughborough, resting overnight at Groby outside Leicester. On that first day, Moore recalled that ‘a contingent of ladies followed us from Hinckley on cycles who proved to be a bit of a menace’, by ‘luring’ the men from their Groby billets into a park. Why, Moore (the son of a clergyman) did not say. The rest of the month saw the Leicestershires in Belper for a few days, before a march to Derby and another train (through Loughborough) to Luton in Northamptonshire.

  Gradually the army put its stamp on man and beast - literally, as blacksmiths stamped a number on horses’ hooves, and men wore an aluminium disc stamped with their name, number, company and regiment. The further the men went, the fainter the contact with home and the more the army took over their lives. Letters were hard enough to write, if you never held a pencil from one month to the next in peacetime; visitors were even more the exception. ‘An Old Newarker’ described in the Newark Advertiser how he saw men of the town among the thousands leaving Derby on Saturday August 15. “All seemed in a jovial mood as they marched on to the ground, sometimes whistling, sometimes singing national airs and ragtime but all in high spirits.” While the men waited at Osmaston Park sidings for their train, wives and mothers of railway workers living nearby offered ‘large washstand jugs of hot tea’. Grocers, showing more enterprise than charity, sold bananas, pears and tomatoes. Troops tucked the fruit away in kitbags for the journey. ‘Newarker’ spotted that the soldiers still had unmilitary mementos of home: “Many men carried their pet mascots, teddy bears, dummy dogs and dolls tied on their knapsacks whilst one private had a live black kitten with red ribbon tied around its neck.”

  Officers had more freedom to roam thanks to money and, if they ran a car, transport, except that command tied them to a place as surely as discipline bound their men. Francis Meynell of Hoar Cross Hall began the war with his battery in Stafford and was able to nip home to his estate at night. He may well have passed within sight of it on the way to his next base, Burton-on-Trent, where he was in charge of an advance party. He was tempted to commute the six miles to sleep at home, rather than in the ‘little anteroom off the town hall’ he wrote to his mother about on August 12. “It is very tantalising being here on my own, yet not being able to leave for fear the telephone may ring.” He like many Territorials, let alone the new recruits, had to get used to waiting to be told where to go next. At the end of August Meynell told his mother from Northamptonshire that he was starting 16 weeks of training ‘and then shall be supposed (?) competent to go into the field abroad’.

  More impatient were Oliver Lyttleton and his friends, whether because they were young (Lyttleton was 21; his friend ‘Bobbety’, Viscount Cranborne, turned 21 in August 1914) or because as aristocrats they expected to get their own way. In August Lyttleton was on guard duty on the nervous East Anglian coast: “Sometimes a sentry on the shore fires a shot and then you rush out with a revolver and find that a bathing machine is riddled with bullets. Officer after admonition returns to his tent,” he told his mother with dry humour in an undated letter. He was doing an officer’s work, but he and his friends did not have the all-important commission:

  Though the War Office gazetted six officers all complete outsiders yesterday to the regiment, none of us. The regiment is furious because they loathe having outsiders in them .... six fellows of a sort they do not like and no doubt it will do the battalions a lot of harm after the war because they will not get the right people from the country. However Lord Salisbury has been to the WO and has raised hell I believe so I may yet be well.

  As ever, a private word was the way to smooth someone’s path; Lord Salisbury was the son of the former Tory prim
e minister, and father of ‘Bobbety’.

  It seemed that regular army officers were fretting that the need for a far bigger army, to beat the Germans, would lower the tone. In fairness, the snobs had a point. Every war had an ending; armies were usually at peace. If a war made ‘outsiders’ into soldiers, the upset would last for years after the war, just as if a business took on too many staff in a boom time, the staff already there would resent the change to their quiet life, and might be out of a job altogether when trade went back to normal. Lord Kitchener, as war minister, was taking as long a perspective, albeit as a military statesman rather than the army equivalent of a trade unionist.

  In The Times on August 15, under the headline ‘The policy of Pitt - Preparing to see the struggle through’, the newspaper’s military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, set out Kitchener’s plan. (Though not one word of Kitchener’s was inside speech marks, by the conventions of journalism of the day this was as plain a statement of policy as Kitchener, or anyone in power, made that month.)

  Kitchener made the reasonable point - though allies might have seen it as selfish - that Britain’s ‘voice in the terms’ of peace would be equal to ‘the weight of our sword’. Kitchener was not to know that four years of trench warfare would so cripple Britain (and France) that they dared not stand up to Hitler, or Mussolini or anyone, a generation later. Two weeks into the war, before the BEF had seen a German, Kitchener had in mind the need for a big army, as big as France’s or anyone’s, not only so that Britain would be on the winning side, but so Britain could bargain with its allies for a better deal. As Britain was ‘dreadfully in arrears’ of everything military, organisation, men, arms and equipment, so Kitchener put it, he was having to start from scratch. This would take time; this assumed the war would last well beyond 1914.

  Kitchener was proved right. Not that being right ever does anyone any good. Liberal ministers resented that Kitchener had shown up their pre-war ‘callous indifference to defence’, as Repington put it in the article. Gossips at the time and historians since have argued whether Kitchener was out of his depth as war minister from 1914, or as skilled a schemer as any politician. Surely it’s more to the point that as the lone military man in cabinet, surrounded by civilians, he had enough to do without making enemies, or worse enemies. Repington had his scoop, but - a warning to every journalist managing his contacts - it was the death of his relationship with the scoop-giver. Lord Kitchener told Repington it was ‘as much as his life was worth’ to see him again. (Had Kitchener, the newcomer to cabinet government, broken the unwritten rules of politics by speaking plainly through Repington, and was bullied into not doing it again? Or had Kitchener had his say and had no more use for Repington?)

  Leaving aside the squabbles at the very top, Kitchener was proposing a wholly new army. As the ‘New Army’ had no history, it did not appeal to the Oliver Lyttletons of this world. “We are angry because it seems possible that we may be gazetted to K’s army,” he told his mother. A ‘New Army’ meant that whatever was already around - the Territorials - did not matter so much. Kitchener, so he told Repington, proposed to divide the Territorials in two: those willing and able to serve abroad, and those not.

  Given the choice, whether because they did not feel they belonged truly to the army, or because they only wanted to do what they had signed for - home defence - a fair few Territorials did not volunteer to go abroad. The 4th battalion the Lincolnshire regiment, for instance, set off by train from Lincoln on August 11 with 1020 men; four officers and 432 ranks who had not volunteered, or were not passed fit for foreign service,e returned home on September 4. Though Repington reported Kitchener’s view that Britain needed both kinds of Territorials - because the stay-at-homes freed somebody else to go abroad - some got bullied for taking the less warlike option. Some 270 Newark Territorials came home on Saturday September 5, half unfit, half by choice. After a Sunday church service, they formed up in Newark Market Place for their depot commander, Colonel G S Foljambe, to tell them he was ashamed of the number of young unmarried men who came back to the town. Not surprisingly, the next day some ‘volunteered’ for foreign service.

  II

  The country waited for news of the men who had marched away, and who did not come back unfit, or who were not sending postcards from camps in the shires. Where had the British army gone? The newspapers of mid-August did not say, or even speculate about the most newsworthy question in the biggest news story of the century.

  For a clue, as faint as the wind on the Wiltshire downs at dawn, you had to read the inquest into two airmen, pilot Robin Skene and his mechanic passenger Raymond Barlow. They and their 3 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps (RFC), were at Netheravon airfield. Above the Avon valley, a few miles from Stonehenge, it was one of the first homes of British military aviation - though flying was still in its early days, and in an emergency any flat field would do to land in. On the morning of August 12, Skene took off, with full petrol tank, tools and other gear. At 150 feet the machine turned to the left, lost speed, and dived vertically, killing both men. Was the aeroplane over-loaded? So the court asked. Other aircraft had taken off loaded as much, it heard.

  Even if you saw the case, which only made the local papers, it would take some deducing. Why were the aeroplanes flying so dangerously heavy? It could only be, because the squadron was moving. Where? To the war.

  III

  Much later - wars later, in 1952 - one of the men taking off from Netheravon that morning, Philip Joubert, recalled the crash in his memoir The Fated Sky. The aircraft had stalled when taking off - always the most dangerous part of a flight, besides landing. Joubert called the crashed Bleriot monoplane his ‘old friend’; he used to fly it.

  Like the other young men of the RFC, Joubert shrugged off death, as something that happened to other people. What else could they do? They had chosen the newest military tool since man had tamed the horse. They learned to fly the same as they had learned to ride a horse; they stayed on or fell off, except that an aeroplane usually fell from a fatal height. Everything the pilots tried was new: flying upside down; flying in the dark (and landing); taking photographs from the air (an interest of Joubert’s). What they could do changed by the year, as aeroplanes flew faster and longer. Joubert’s squadron’s 140-mile hop from Netheravon to Dover was a day’s work in August 1914; in 1908, it would have set a world distance record. Could the aeroplane become an army’s eye in the sky, to spot the enemy, and return with warning, many times faster than the cavalry that every army had relied on for the last few thousand years? The airmen - and the enemy airmen - would find out soon what (if anything) an aeroplane was for.

  Aeroplanes were still fragile, untrustworthy things; engines could stop, pieces could break. Few of the airmen, setting off for France the next morning, had ever crossed sea before. Some had flown to Ireland (and back), but only by the shortest crossing, the 16 miles from Stranraer. Anything more was risky. Joubert and the pilots leaving Dover early on August 13 - before the inquest at Netheravon would open - were each given a motor-car tyre inner tube, ‘which we were instructed to blow up and wear around our middles’, Joubert recalled, ‘in case we fell into the ‘Drink’ on our way to France’. One pilot tried to drop his like a quoit on the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez.

  Chapter 20

  Forward

  He was at the age of hope, and something within him, which did not represent mere youthful illusion, supported his courage in the face of calculations such as would have damped sober experience.

  The House of Cobwebs, George Gissing

  Even to see the sea was a novelty for some, to the condescending amusement of others. While at Dovercourt, guarding the ports of Harwich and Felixstowe, Oliver Lyttleton ended a letter to his mother: “I hear a sentry behind me saying to a pal watching a school of porpoises, ‘look at that bloody great fish’. Local colour OL.”

  A sea voyage was even more exotic if you ha
d never been beyond the seaside, or the horizon. Not that the soldiers had a good view, or any view. John Harding, a private in the Queen’s West Surrey regiment, recalled the next month how men were packed on their ship ‘like sardines in a tin’, some crowded on deck, some below, some even crammed in the lifeboats. Neither they nor the crew knew where they were going.

  A fuller account of a crossing came from the brothers Harry and Will Woodin, who did at least hear that they were heading for France. In peacetime they each drove motor omnibuses between Alfreton and Derby; each had joined the Army Service Corps as drivers. “We had a fine-send off from Liverpool,” they told their parents in a joint letter. “All the ships in the river cheered us as we passed with their whistles. We could not hear ourselves speak when they were all on at once. There were hundreds of people on the banks cheering us, and the ships were signalling ‘good luck’ with their flags.” After they set off at 11am, on Saturday August 15, they did not have much to write home about, apart from a Saturday night concert, and an ‘exciting few minutes’ on the Sunday afternoon when they saw a ‘big battleship making straight towards us’: